November's Bipolar Mantra:

"Life is not a problem to be solved"
"It is a mystery to be lived"

When Cultural Constructs Replace Reality

 

The Bush administration’s consciousness is rooted in paradigms that have outlived their usefulness. We are not defending our nation from foreign aggressors, circling the wagons or sending out the cavalry to round up the Indians. I’m sure that is how the more primitive forces in this world, religious fundamentalists, politicians under siege and tinhorn dictators, for example, think and how they would want us to think.

 

A Good vs. Evil, Black and White (BW) standard fits their unshakeable mythologies, cartoonish world-views and simplified ideologies so much better than a nuanced understanding of their own, our own, conflicted participation in world events. Their actions, based on this BW filter often produce results that confirm the BW world-view.  Flying commercial jet-liners into the WTC is just such action and our “War on Terrorism” defined first by tonnage in high explosives dropped on Afghanistan, is just such a reaction. It’s hard to be nuanced with explosives.

 

And now there’s the threatened war on Iraq. When I watch the news and read the Times, the Times, mind you, I get the feeling that everyone, the president, congressmen, newscasters, journalists and pundits are caught in some cultural construct that pretends to be reality but is far from it. Saddam Hussein and Iraq are just such cultural constructs: “A vicious dictator leading a dangerous and armed nation with the latest massively destructive weaponry is threatening the good old U.S. of A. and with it the peace of the world.”

 

Doesn’t anyone remember he lost the Gulf War; we destroyed most of his army and much of his army’s equipment? He lost decisively, whole armies surrendered. We bombed his facilities for several weeks before we launched the ground attack. We dropped a lot of ordinance on whatever we deemed strategically important. We dealt Iraq crippling blows, destroying much of their infrastructure. That was twelve years ago.

 

Doesn’t anyone remember that after that defeat, UN inspection and demolition teams worked in Iraq for seven years before Saddam threw them out? Seven years of tracking down every known piece of evidence, and then burning, bulldozing and blowing-up all suspected facilities, technology he might have accumulated in the thirty years he’d been in power. Had the UN ever done that to any other nation? Then right after those seven years we imposed drastic sanctions for five years seriously restricting Iraq’s trade, especially its trade in technology. And we divided his country into three parts, giving him the middle and continuously patrolling the other two thirds, the north and south no-fly zones. You mean that after twelve such years Iraq is still a threat. Hard to believe.  

 

The flesh and blood of human beings, the millions of Iraqis trying to eke out a living after 12 years of punishing sanctions, are not under consideration. I haven’t heard one commentator raise the issue. What does war mean. It means the infrastructure of the country will be targeted once again, the initial softening up by bombing. Bombing what? Bombing never quite repaired electrical plants, communication facilities, water supplies, bridges, rail-lines, roadways, fuel depots, and government buildings. These are Iraq’s accomplishments, their reach for modernity. We will wipe them out. America’s war with Iraq will set those millions of ordinary Iraqis back another fifty years, back to ox-carts, dusty trails and olive trees, their civilizing, middle class dreams destroyed, and with them the chance of them becoming a modern Muslim ally.

 

And has anyone heard any real discussions about the powerlessness of an aging leader, surrounded by bodyguards, afraid for his life, sleeping every night in a different location, whose disastrous miscalculation, his invasion of Kuwait, completely ruined his formerly prosperous, middle class, well armed country. Do we really think this limping, sickly nation and its aging tin-horn dictator, holding desperately onto power over one third of his country, isolated from contact with the world, is a threat to anyone, no less the United States.

 

And if they offer to let UN inspectors in once again, even if their offer is under threat of U.S. aggression, doesn’t that mean they would rather save their country from the devastation of war with America, isn’t that what we want our threat to accomplish? And if we believe our bombing will be able to neutralize their weapons of mass destruction, doesn’t that mean that we know where these weaponry facilities are? Doesn’t that mean that inspectors, once allowed in, can go right to those locations, so well known to us, and effectively destroy them without loss of life?

 

And how could Bush be withholding evidence of Iraq’s threatening criminality from congress and the people on the basis of not wanting to compromise our intelligence sources within Iraq, when he is about to bomb Iraq back to the stone age? Where will those operatives be then? And what’s more important, the security of our operatives or the decision making responsibility of the people of the U.S. and their representatives? Shouldn’t war be properly debated with all information available? Isn’t that what a democracy means? Should the decision of one man consulting only with his appointed cabinet be sufficient to commit the might of America’s armed forces? Mightn’t he be wrong, of poor judgment, shortsighted, mistaken? Is he some sort of pope, infallible and to be unquestioningly trusted based on his say so? Give me a break.

 

And why Iraq? How about Iran, Russia, Pakistan, India, North Korea, Israel? They all have weapons of mass destruction right now, and many have the means to deliver them. They all have semi-stable governments that might one day, if left alone and given time, be able to threaten the U.S. or U.S. interests. And won’t the number of nations fitting that category continue to increase as time goes by. How long before Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Malaysia, Indonesia, Bangladesh, South Africa, Brazil, Columbia and Mexico have these capabilities? Ten years? Twenty years?

 

Our cultural construct: “Saddam Hussein, a vicious dictator dangerous and armed with the latest massive weaponry is threatening the good old U.S. of A.” overwhelms the reality and we base our actions on how to have a shortsighted victory over this cultural construct of our own making. We seem to forget about how the image of blond American Christian soldiers killing dark skinned Arab Muslims will play out on Al Jazeera television broadcasts throughout the Muslim world. We seem to forget that power concentrated in a state government is infinitely easier to deal with, to threaten, to contain, then the roaming bands of desperately enraged refugees and their fanatic causes created by war.

 

And what about the precedent of pre-emptive action? Does this new international precedent mean that any nation can launch an attack on its neighbor if it suspects, in the light of secret unspecified intelligence, that that neighbor may in the future obtain weapons that could threaten it’s security. What kind of precedent is that? We lost 3000 Americans in the WTC attack. Can you estimate the number of lives that will be lost if this reasoning is adopted by nations presently having border difficulties? The planet would erupt in an orgy of paranoid pre-emptive strikes that would quickly escalate into real warfare.

 

Our attack on Iraq will be real warfare, with the US, for one of the first times in its history, as confessed aggressor, willing to hide behind a reasoning process that if adopted by the world would result in chaos. And this at a time when order and cooperation are coming to be the paradigms of a newly emerging earth consciousness. How did America slip backward so fast and so far? 

 

We should, at this time in humanity’s journey, not be building power blocks bent on manipulating opposing power blocks for our own advantage or labeling the resulting checkerboard world as good and evil. That is how it’s been for much of human history. Our planet is too small, and getting smaller, for that strategy to continue to have meaning. It no longer makes sense for parts of this planet to war with other parts. It means fighting with lethal technologies, one crowd against another, in a closed container. Everyone gets hurt eventually.

 

We now know that we are all on spaceship earth and we are beginning to understand that mother earth is a limited resource of shrinking dimensions, a resource we all need and depend on. Events can no longer be contained within national borders. Communicable diseases, weaponry and other destructive technologies, environmental degradation, overly exploited natural resources, risky bio-engineered products, and reactionary ideologies travel around the planet as easily as do global financial institutions, consumer product parts, resources, unfettered trade and inclusive worldviews. It can’t be helped. It comes with the territory.

 

We, humanity, led by the United States as the key player, should be initiating the development of all sorts of global structures. The threats to humanity’s surviving and prospering need to be addressed on a global scale, the only scale capable of success. Most of humanity’s problems are resource driven and require global solutions, or, at the very least, global understandings, global resolve and global cooperation. Just as we weave communication, transportation, energy and information systems into planetary networks, so must we weave international laws, standards of behavior, environmental policy, tolerance and social safety nets, into broad sets of planetary agreements.

 

On this score the Bush administration is batting zero. They’ve pulled the U.S. out of more global structures in the nineteen months they’ve been in office than any U.S. regime in history. Just when global cooperation becomes the appropriate strategy, we, like an angry bull in the china shop of mother earth, resort to the most primitive and hostile of stances: “I’ll do what I like and what I think is in my best interest, the hell with the rest of the world, and if they don’t like it, that’s their problem.”

 

It’s hard to believe that our president can be so unaware of humanity’s consciousness raising journey and so unaware of what we’ve learned, where we are, and what tasks need doing next. He seems so narrowly focused on oil and its supply, on business and its immediate needs, on the United States as a defensible entity in a cruel world. He seems so willing to abort broad long-term principled objectives for narrow short-term pragmatic advantages.

 

I think it’s that 1990s corporate world he and his cabal came out of: “show them a good next quarter, let me cash in my chips, and leave others with the inevitable mess,” a mess guaranteed by shortsightedness and an immature weakness for immediate gratification. And young George W. wasn’t even a top player: alcoholic philanderer for a while, he ran a small oil company, made off with some funds, got handed a baseball club, enriched himself some more, and ended up squeaking a legal victory out of a resounding numeric defeat to become the minority President of the United States.

 

How he believes this to be a mandate for some of the most dramatic international and domestic policy shifts undertaken by a president during his first term in office, and how the American people are letting him, nay helping him, get away with it, is blowing my mind. It seems so obvious that this puppet, one can easily imagine strings attached to his stiff adolescent strut, is being manipulated by those that backed him into power.

 

Not so much that they do so by any sort of coercion, quite the contrary, he has willingly signed on. Without them he never would have made it anywhere near this far, and without an agreeable beneficiary of their largess, one who has no agenda of his own, they would have never had it so easy. A match made in hell.

 

These wealthy backers believe that wealth is the best hallmark for determining intelligent policy. They, like Rumsfield and Cheney, seem to be continuously smirking at representatives of the people, reporters, journalists, congressmen and pundits. The Smirk’s rhetoric question: how could you guys really understand the complexity of why and how we, the wealthy and powerful, try to save your silly middle class asses from the really bad guys, you have no inkling, who stalk this planet?

 

I simply don’t believe them and neither should you. See through the bullshit. Insist on verifiable evidence. Don’t let them twist your common sense by calling war peace, aggression security, and destruction progress. We are more intelligent than that.

 

Morty Breier,

September 19, 2002,  Kailua-Kona, Hawaii

 

MILLENNIUM 3

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A new byline by JoEl Cohen

Conundrum Central – Enigmas are Us

 

Morty,

I have not been much in the mood for writing lately and so I have not.  I hope to overcome this inhibition soon and you remain fertile in your expressions and I remain impressed by your writing for whatever that is worth.  This missive is a pleasant piece of writing and probably apropos at many points in our (the U.S. ) history if not at most. Ironically the American entity has been accused at one extreme of being isolationist and refusing to engage the rest of the world which operated in a global turmoil of mercantilism and colonialism and super-war; in general we played a small role in that history by comparison with Europe and Japan . Now we appear to be over-involved, potentially getting our hands into every world situation and on our terms; no longer isolated but engaged and in a way that is increasingly negatively viewed or at least criticized. I am going to make some disjointed remarks (literally) and then pass them this back to you.

 

Somehow our cultural GOD has been MONEY, by which individuals keep score but perhaps more significantly efficiency by which entities compete and it is this notion which affects the international reality of competition, wages and much of the way people are treated. When Iran ran out of minesweepers in its war with Iraq it used what it had in excess supply, young men who at very low cost could sweep those fields. We can pass on money and make know-how available and train people but the international system, particularly the large American and European entities is based on a return on ‘capital’ whatever that is. So here we sit agreeing on the one hand that our corporate behemoths are greedy, uncaring, arbitrary, and often fraudulent and then on the other hand we have so called states all over the planet that are so corrupt and incapable that they have no need of fraudulent accounting – they simply steal it all, return it all to the industrial geniuses to manage their so called capital. What’s a CAPITALIST EMPIRE to do?  The Nigerians seemingly keep 90% of their oil dollars; their leaders steal the rest and deposit it with the Swiss who the way just legalized abortion and have had a steady population for a few thousand years.

 

I think here we  were brought up to think that each man must fall back on himself, find his own way and that this somehow applies to the peoples of the world as well, limited though they may be by their own corruptions and systemic . We are a nation of engineers, accountants and problem solvers where everything constantly changes and our justice system are the referees in the battle of doing. Over here Ideas need to be turned into uses and things; ideas are often of little interest in and of themselves. So at one level we dominate in part because don’t stop creating and keeping up with that takes a great deal of energy.

 

The ideas of unabridged freedom in personal pursuit is so heavily ingrained in our middle classes that we relate up not down – we look up to the stars, the heralded, the middle class to the rich and the rich to the very rich with each wishing to be the other because that is where status seems to exist. In a sense the middle class has learned to be more empathetic with the ‘rich’ than with the ‘poor’ because the middle class value system has largely shifted to be greed based and ironically the rich and powerful whom should counter the trend reinforce it instead –because apparently that is where the greatest status exists.

 

Yes we are propagandized and persuaded at every turn but this has always been true of our democratic system; the very few slaveholders convinced the peoples of the slave holding states that they needed to die in our most deadly war to keep those slaveholders in the money.  So it is somehow possible for someone (say the ex-president of Tyco) to earn 300 or 400 million dollars and then try to avoid a million dollars in sales tax in the same way that your average Joe always wanted to send empty boxes to New Jersey to avoid the city sales tax  - and in the process that rich someone having lowered himself to a more common ethic is still  looked well upon. The sense of polarity that exists in times of depression do not exist in times of wealth creation – very few are going to trade in their SUV;s for some view of the greater good but that is because the very educational system you speak of has yet to come to terms with what is our role and purpose outside of being purely economic, independent, striving beings.

 

I think your ‘manifesto’ is clear, sensible, logical, and useful and tends to avoid the more inflammatory points (See Spring/Summer 02 archive of Monthly Missive: WAKE ME WHEN BUSH'S TERM IS OVER). I still think that the problems with the Muslim world are neither of our making nor ours to solve; in the same way that we need another cycle of reform they (the Muslims) do as well and in spades. Israel and the Palestinians have put themselves into a combined death spiral – to me, the result of a sequence of bad decisions one after another, from the cooption of territory to the active teaching of hate to the retention of cultural memories which are no longer applicable or meaningful. The sad role that religion has played here has only pointed out that as a counter balance to hate and vengeance and to the inherent spiritual weaknesses of selfish democracy – that organized religion has run its course and does not provide the balance.

 

We need to get our meaning in life from the beauties of the universe that unfold in science, philosophy and the arts of human performance and interaction.  We are approaching a time when there is much less to do and where the freely driven sense of contemplation and the enjoyment of existence will take on paramount importance.  The dams have been built, the mountains climbed, the genes unearthed, the nuclear energies exposed, the forests eaten up, the oceans fished out, the quantum universe applied, the fields tilled to extract every last nutrient etc etc.  We are wired to the extreme, and media and opinion of all types are available to virtually everyone.  We do not lack for information, we lack for judgment. The skills of sound decision making are the true signs of an advanced and sustainable culture.

 

The challenges are becoming those of controlling ourselves, of limiting the excesses of our behavior, of recognizing limits and making the democratic systems one in which the middle class is taught the concepts of noblesse oblige – then perhaps our leadership which seems bent on copying or ‘playing into’ our worst habits by polling us every few weeks will get the point that we need better leadership.  This will be true for America , Iraq , Iran , Saudi Arabia , Israel etc. Israel’s democracy is considering not allowing native Arab citizens to own so called government lands which apparently account for a sizeable portion of all land in Israel – who taught them that idea; and Saudi Arabia allowed 15 girls to die in a fire because they were not wearing the right outfits to be let out or for the fireman to be let in – what fools figured that one out.

 

To repeat my point our problem is not science coming to terms with philosophy or religion it is the endless engineered application of science without reason or reasoned purpose and the almost complete failure of religion to provide moral and ethical purpose without moralizing. What in gods name makes our religious people have nothing to say about 100,000 targeted nuclear bombs but get all passionate when ten laboratories want to see if stem cells can help re-grow nerve tissue? Why doesn’t the catholic church pass out condoms and provides some of its tithes to help cure AIDS – maybe in conjunction with some biotechnology company. In the inner reaches of our soul if we are brought up correctly we have a deep and intimate spiritual sense and it compels us to inwardly contemplate the universe, to work out our common sense of right and wrong behavior and to recognize our common fate. This spiritual sense as far as I know does not tell us to walk from door to door handing out literature on second, third and fourth comings.

 

If it turns out that the only result of an improved sense of purpose and generosity is to foster increasingly larger and greedier populations with the same limited sense of purpose and which foster absurd value systems then from my point of view ‘who cares’.  Capitalism is just a term. People need to engage in useful activity, want to engage in useful activity and have the right to do so as members of communities throughout the world. When The USSR put 8,000,000 people in camps in Siberia, made the general population wait in line for a few tidbits of food everyday while building 200 or 300 tons of the most dangerous poisons, not to mention 30,000 hydrogen bombs and only manage 30,000 telephone lines for their capital,  well this is not an ism but ‘fuck-you’ ism. There are many good examples of cultures today; socialistic, humanistic with their own ways of doing things – generally smaller entities – France or Spain , or Canada or Sweden or perhaps Finland or New Zeeland or Australia and others working on their problems seriously; maybe Japan and so on. There is more of this than meets the eye at first glance. This government and we the people may yet get our comeuppance, that is what we deserve (as our hubris sticks out its ugly head), but by my way of thinking it will more be the result of envy than oppression caused by us; or perhaps like cancer it will be the result of a thousand accumulated mistakes and changes which finally go over the line.

 

JoEl – Reporting from Conundrum Central – Enigmas are Us, 

July 16,2002, Georgetown Connecticut

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THE FEAST

By Rosé  

I underwent a lost weekend experience

By answering an invitation to a lunch

Mine hosts prepared a vast array of succulence

 Which ended up delivering a knockout punch

 Gin fizzes all around they started to dispense

Served up with edamame beans on which to munch

The foamy splendor of the egg whites and the taste

Of lime and heavy cream all worries soon erased

I drank at least a half a dozen by my count

And felt my being gently float without restraint

While everybody else poured down twice that amount

And more, without the slightest hint of a complaint

I sipped again from that free flowing gin fizz fount

And felt the glow of warmth you feel before you faint

Soon all the bubbles in my blood and brain exploded

I was perfectly balanced and perfectly loaded

Then came a couple trays with silver dollar size

Buckwheat pancakes with radish sprouts and salmon smoked

Our host had flown to Chile to aromatize

That fish he caught there and he personally stoked

The smoke house fire and now presented us this prize

Whose delicate pink flesh immediately provoked

The one response, we held our glasses up, and then

Toasted our hosts, who filled them to the brim again

It's a wise host who knows far better than his guest

The time has come to switch from gin to beer and wine

And though this move made us a little bit distressed

Because we doubted anything could be as fine

We soon forgot and drank the red and white with zest

As we were served a course grown on a different vine

Squash blossoms stuffed with wild salmon mousse then rolled in Eggs and flour, sauteed, not golden brown, but golden...

...Along with this there came a lively dip of cream

With bits of Kalamati olives sprinkled round

These tasty toasted blossoms bloomed more than supreme

The pleasures of those tastes still on my tongue abound

I caught myself slipping into a lovely dream

Where every little thing in alcohol was drowned

Our hosts bade us arise to take a walk across

The grounds: arroyos, juniper, cacti and moss

When we returned about a half an hour later

Refreshed and ready to resume our sumptuous feeding

Our hosts who were quite determined they would cater

To every single whim went on with the proceeding

Preparing us a soup to satisfy a satyr

Which after refills sent us instantly stampeding

I think its origin was somewhere in the Congo

I had a beer and learned they called it Bongo-Bongo

I must describe this soup that was so very rich

But first before continuing I have to note

I knew exactly what the hour was 'pon which

We first arrived, when I began to nicely float

It was just two, and now I saw that it was six

The odds this feast would ever end were quite remote

We drank with spoons, we sipped right from the cup like birds

And after seconds of this soup we called for thirds

It was concocted of these elements I'll name

Some sauteed leeks, steamed spinach, very young and green

Two pounds of oysters cooked on just a tiny flame

All thrown into the blender, whipped by the machine

To a puree, a touch of curry powder, wild yet tame

We finished off the soup, and lo, time for caffeine

A few rounds of "Post Alley Speedball Queens" 'twas called

Double expresso bourbons in case your engine's stalled...

...Then we volatilized a bit, some wine, some beer

The hosts prepared a pasta radiatore

Little radiators, the next course to appear

That matched the morels in the sauce, which gave it glory

We all agreed this dish was something to revere

Just like that time in...But that's another story

I walked outside alone to make a water-mark

The stars were shining bright. It was completely dark

I glided back inside in time to see the change

Of platters, dishes, plates and underplates, The glasses

Were being filled afresh with wines both rich and strange

I heard the mellow tone of talk 'tween lads and lasses

The pleasant murmur of musical depth and range

Lost in the afterglow of dining that surpasses

When what should greet our eyes but a simple salad

Wearing garlic dressing, worthy of a ballad

Well, that's the end. There's nothing more to say except

That as we struggled to our feet to start for home

A raspberry sorbet with strawberry slices stepped

On to the table like an Emperor on his throne

Double expressos, creamed, with bourbon too. We wept

And while we ate and drank eight happy hours had flown

I'm used to dining country style, you know, hog in trough

But after this all I can say is: Stanley, Rose, hats off!

©2001, 2002,Rose'

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S A G E   R E M A R K S

KABBALAH'S COSMOLOGY

 

Dear Mark

 

I appreciated your talk at New Thought and I thank you for it. You did a very nice job of presenting the mystical creation myth in which God breaths too much spirit into the vessel of creation, shattering it, and the holy work God would have man do is to elevate the profane shards into sacred presences, the work of tikkun olem, healing the world. I've explored the meaning of the Kabbalistic cosmology that you described. Since I know something of the accepted modern scientific cosmological model and being a student of humanity and its wisdom traditions, I've sought to integrate these knowledge bases into a coherent inclusive explanation. Here’s what I came up with.
 

The Idea of God making a space within His/Her presence to make room for His/Her creation, tzim-tzum, coincides with the perfect unmoving nature of the silent ground from which creativity springs. Creativity is an ongoing process that moves from potential to reality, with each new reality having new potential. Since God, or the emptiness that preceded the Big Bang, the silent Ein Sof, has, by definition, no unfolding or development, there is nothing to develop into, the room for a creative developing universe, needed to be created first.

 

But what first crystallizes out of the perfectly ordered silence, God’s Buddha nature, the Ein Sof, without beginning or end, before matter appears, is the matter-less laws that will govern this potential creation. We differentiate between the material world and the non-material world using the terms phenomenon and noumenon. Phenomenon is that which can be measured, i.e. energy, force fields, time and matter. Noumenon is that which cant be measured, i.e. thoughts, laws, concepts, consciousness itself.

 

The noumenal aspects of creation precede the phenomenal aspects. The thought of creation precedes the act of creation. The New Testament begins with “First there was the word.” The Rabbis say “Even HaShem had to consult the Torah to create the universe.” The laws of physics, the noumenal reality, sit behind the wheeling of the universe and the dance of atoms, the phenomenal reality, and direct them. Lawfullness directs energy, matter and time.

 

The same is true with conscious beings: Kavannah, intent, precedes actions and is their cause, again a case of noumenon directing phenomenon. This is the spirit that God breathes into the vessel of creation; you might better say this spirit is meant to establish the initial shape of the vessel of creation (in fact modern cosmology says that the time/space continuum is, because of the laws that govern it, saddle shaped).

 

The picture emerging of the early state of the universe soon after the big bang from which it was created, has it very fragmented indeed. Energy and Matter were in a state of supreme compressed chaos, probability functions collapsing into infinesmally small virtual particles that immediately return to probability states, lasting billionths of a second before being churned back into the quantum soup from which it emerged. This early universe has absolutely no structure, no stability, no complexity, no meaning, it is infinitely fragmented.

 

Although consisting of energetic “noise”, this initial state is very close to the silent stillness from which it emerged, because it’s homogeneity, spectacularly high energy and lack of any structural coherence gives it maximum creative potential, maximum opportunity for ongoing development, for establishing a story line, for precipitating out an unimaginable array of structures, from galaxies to humans. Only the laws, the noumenon, spirit itself, remains constant through the fifteen billion year journey that our universe takes to get to us. Matter and energy are continuously rearranged, complexified and stabilized in a never ending process of increasing its ability to bring meaning and structure to what was once chance and chaos.

 

We humans are the latest creation in this long creative journey that our universe has taken from its big-bang inception to the present. We are more capable of giving meaning to the creation we find ourselves in than any of the universe’s previous creations. It is what we do. It is what we were created to do. We are simply carrying on, more effectively than ever before, the universes potential for connecting everything back to its noumenal origins, to the spirit that created it, to the laws that govern it, to the consciousness that embraces it.

 

When we form communities and societies, when we establish ethical and moral standards, when science uncovers the physical laws that connect phenomenon, when we surround ourselves with cultural constructs, language, history, technology, artifacts, we are weaving meaning into the objects of our reality, we are nurturing relationships with those we come in contact with, we are putting noumenal spirit into, or unveiling the noumenal spirit intrinsic to the phenomenal universe.

 

Of course the better we do this, the more embracing and inclusive we are in our world view, the more harmony we can see, the more love and awe with which we can witness reality, the better our thoughts and actions can become, the more we are doing what God created us to do. We find a fragmented reality and we attempt reconnecting the fragments. We find a world that is a work in progress, and we strive to help it along on its journey. We find imperfect social arrangements and we lend our voices toward bettering them. We find ourselves born into a cosmic story line and we try finding our role in this unfolding drama. We practice tikkun olem, repairing or healing the world.

 

We look ahead and can barely discern the outline of a better reality and this vision pulls us forward. We have called this vision many things throughout our history, the history of humanity’s expanding consciousness. Our wisdom traditions have thought of this better reality in Messianic terms: “A time when the lion will lie down with the lamb.”  The Messiah would save us.

 

When we believed that the world as we knew it was created fully formed and presented to us, fully formed human creatures, the profound extent of a universe that was itself an on-going creation, itself an unfolding story line, a work in progress, was not appreciated. Our salvation, therefore, seemed to us to lie in a supernatural event that would interrupt the given, unchanging scene. God would send a sacred knight on a white horse who would save us from the tyranny of the profanely repetitive and unchangeable natural world.

 

We now know that the very fabric of reality is a work in progress, that everything we see was something else in the past and will be something else in the future. The present is merely a cross-section of a living story-line that has been fifteen billion years in the making. Not only does everything change, but the part of the story-line that we emerge from has been changing in a particular direction, the direction of increasing complexity, of more powerful mastery, of expanding awareness.

 

From the Big-Bang to you and me lies an unbroken lineage of successful innovation and creativity aimed at producing creatures better adapted to reality and that mandate has produced its corollary, creatures that are increasingly aware of the reality they find themselves in, the more aware the better able to adapt. In a primitive sense, the atom is more complex, stable and long-lived, more adapted to its reality, than the sub-atomic particle and creates the elements that form the material universe. Molecular arrangements are more potentially creative than atoms and chemistry is born. The hydrocarbon is more fruitful than the other molecular arrangements and organic chemistry appears. DNA masters organic chemistry better than the lifeless hydrocarbon and produces the wonders of life.

 

And we humans, amongst all living creatures, have, through hundreds of millions of years of successful evolutionary experimentation, emerged from life’s story-line on this planet earth with a consciousness that is capable of taking in much more of reality than anything ever had before. And then we are blessed with language that enables us to pass on what we learn to the next generation, with each generation able to build upon what the last has passed on to it. We are the first living creatures to accumulate our understandings over time and our doing so is called human history. We emerged from the evolutionary unfolding of the biosphere and started our own human history, the story line of our accumulating knowledge, understanding, wisdom, technologies, societal configurations and cultural constructs.

 

We have reached a stage where human consciousness is able to understand that this creative process that produced us, is an inherent property of the universe, an inherent property of humanity and an inherent property of each of us. In fact our best take on things is that it is just this property that we owe our existence to, just this property that we owe our future to, just this property that defines our God. We, humanity’s world view, our consciousness, our wisdom and understanding is a work in progress, a never completed project, a continuously improving construct, whose goal is to bring together and fully harmonize the fragmented shards of this our holy universe. The job is ours.

 

We do so by managing our affairs in concentric circles that radiate out from our being: family, congregation, community, town, state, nation, the industrialized countries, humanity, the ecosphere, planet earth, our solar system, the milky way galaxy, the cosmos. The more we can put together, the more we can relate to, the more we can love, the more will we be doing God’s work, the more we will be fulfilling the universe’s objectives, the more we will be aligning our intent and their resultant actions with the direction God’s universe wants us to go. It is definitely our sacred task.

 

Now that presentation of the Kabbalist’s vision is, in my way of thinking, nicely in keeping with what our sages had in mind. Sages, after all, are those amongst us who discern reality’s inherent characteristics before the rest of us do. The developmental story line, later to be revealed by science, would be just such a prescient sagacious observation and would result in images of an initially fragmented world that needed a story line, with humanity as the ultimate performers, that aimed at its re-assembly, tikkun olem.

 

Morty Breier

October 1, 2002

Kailua-Kona, Hawaii

 

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CROSS CULTURAL SEX

An Italian, a Frenchman and Jew are standing around talking about what great lovers they are.

 

The Italian says "Last night, I take my wife and I cover her entire body with olive oil and I make passionate love to her... she scream for twenty minutes."

 

The Frenchman tisks and says "Last night I took my wife and I covered her entire body with grade A butter and I made passionate love to her... she screamed for a half hour."

 

The Jewish guy tisks at both stories and says "Last night I grabbed my wife and I covered her entire body in shmaltz, chicken fat, and I made unbelievably passionate love to her... she screamed for two hours."

 

"She screamed for two hours," the other men said incredulously, "How did you do that?"

 

"I wiped my hands on the drapes." the Jew replied.

 

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TONY PRICE'S LAST STUDIO

Tony Price's last studio was in Reserve, New Mexico.
Plans are developing to create a permanent home
for this collection of 144 works of Atomic Art.

This E-Zine of sorts is being started with no expectations. I need not earn a living so my time is my own and I elect to play with some of that time by launching this MONTHLY MISSIVE. It is a creative act inspired by Rabbi Zalman Schechter-Shalomi, my guru once removed, who said "It's time to download our wisdom on the hard drive of humanity." He was speaking to those of us who prefer sageing to ageing.

The idea is to get a bunch of hip contributors, secret sages,  to comment on the passing scene, to offer creative work and to wax philosophical about perennial issues.  The tribe's elders, and I count myself among them, need a forum and at least this is a start. To begin with, I hope that my dear friends become this E-Zine's regular contributors. The trouble is that they are, as is perfectly appropriate for this mission, iconoclasts to the core and getting them to cooperate is like hearding cats.

And that's just the part that tries filling these electronic pages... trying to get readers is an entirely different proposition. I remember an actor telling me that it's better to be in a play with a large cast because then all the family and friends of the cast are at least sure to help fill the seats. The start of this E-Zine readership will be like that. Friends have friends and family. And who better to make contact with than our friends and family.

Even though we now have had only three other contributors, my cousin and dear friend Marcus Uzilevsky, my old buddy, the wonderful poet Rose', and posthumously, the legendary Tony Price, the rest being my stuff, I hope these pages might inspire others to join in. I will be sending email messages to those I particularly want to contribute but everyone is welcome to try their hand. I hope to have several different views on a particular topic that needs addressing and I'll let you know each month what those topics are.

Feel free, of course, to submit anything you want. I would like your submittal to be accompanied by your photo and an autobiographical piece. I can read attachments in Microsoft Word or in Corel WordPerfect and I prefer JPEG formatted images. My email address is morty@aloha.net. Let's see what we can do together. Remember:

POWER TO THE PEOPLE.
SHALOHA
MORTY BREIER, Editor

Marcus Uzilevsky: We are proud to have as a contributor distinguished California artist and musician Marcus Uzilevsky. Talk about hip, he's in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, for his 1965-68 group The Third Bardo, (he jammed with Dylan in the Cafe Wah). Under his present name Uzca, he has two world music CDs Slice of Light and Gypsy Dreams, this last he calls Nouveau Klezmer. Klezmer, the Jewish music of Eastern Europe with its weeping and laughing clarinets and violins has always been in Uzca's heart and soul and his latest CD blends Gypsy guitars, African talking drums, Middle Eastern belly dancing rythms, Klezmer violin and clarinet and hypnotic vocals in his intuitive universal language. We are invited to join in the dance of life to celebrate our common humanity. As an artist Marcus is well hung in permanent collections and 50 one man shows, selling over a half million lithographs. Born in Brooklyn, migrating to California in the late sixties he is now esconsed in an old railroad building on the fringes of Marin. Uzilevsky has long been a spiritual journeyer, creating his poetry in both the visual and musical arts. The man is out there and be here to tune in on his poetic offerings..

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Rose': Rose' was born deep in the Bronx in 1934. He began crafting his poetry attending a number of colleges during the 50's. After a stint in the army he bounced around working as a lifeguard, masseur and astrology writer. He saw his heaviest combat duty teaching High School English in New York. In the early sixties he assiduously pursued Ancient Greek while dining on Mexican beaches, toping in European cafes and slumming in Moroccan dives. Between a stint of acting, including the movie "The Edge", he published a book of drawings and launched skin diving trips throughout the Yucatan and the Florida Keys. His "School of the Night" specialized in occult classes and his "Liquid Wedge Gallery" made media history with sculptor Tony Price's first "Atomic Art Show" in NYC in 1969. Struck with what he calls his "Man-o-pause", Rose' started his epic poem "The Pearl in the Crown", still a grand work in progress. He performs as a stand-up poet in salons, homes, theatres, clubs, sushi bars, on radio and television in New York, Los Angeles, Miami and Santa Fe. Rose' now lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

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Tony Price, 1937-2000: Thomas Anthony Price wa born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1937. He began his art career in the Marine Corps, painting sixty-foot murals and portraits of generals. After his stint in the marines, 1955-57, he painted and illustrated books, poetry and magazines in New York City and Mexico. Price then worked from 1962-3 as an art director and set designer in films and television for Studio 30 in New York and Brazil. In 1963 Price left for Paris and Rome to paint. His European work is held by collectors in Italy, France, Holland, Germany and Spain. In 1964 he returned to New York and began sculpting in stone, metal and electronic materials. Since his move to New Mexico in 1965, Price has worked with nuclear scrap materials exclusively from Los Alamos from which he has created icons of world religions. Tony died in early 2000 after a yearlong battle with a stroke that had left him partially paralyzed.

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HOLIT BAT-EDIT.   The term that I made up, SPIRITUAL BIVOUAKING could be seen as a “conceit” — that is, each word has the opposite meaning. This is not my intention. For me the meaning is that I have found both a safe and nurturing place to be/live.
    It has taken me 55 years to arrive! First I had to acknowledge that the ancient rites or customs of my tribe could seep through to me over thousands of years - and that was hard to conceive. My tribe wandered around the middle east, then got exiled into Europe, Asia, Africa and the Northern Hemisphere taking us through different customs, different colors, different foods and different languages — it certainly rubbed off on me and my family. I spent nearly half a life time, trying to return to the metropolitan desert of unleavened bricks (Israel, Greece, Egypt) and then, the second part, trying to spiritual bivouak here on the Pacific Rim of the Big Island.
    At the beginning of the 90’s, I landed on the Big Island, and with just a few escapes back to my roots in the middle east, I have bern sinking healthy roots into this rock.
    Luckily I have crossed paths with a Hawaiian woman sage — The Messenger-Mahealani. Many spirits here have visited, tested and frightened me at the beginning. Semi-conscious, I went through some ceremonies, perhaps they were initiations of which I knew nothing; of seeing marchers go by, of having animal guardians that I was too ignorant of understanding and accepting. Sometimes I tried not to see it negatively and just to interpret it as wild, dramatic and inexplicable!
    Ultimately I crossed Pele on her own summit — Kilauea, and she gave me a lesson that I still shudder to remember. I was thrown flat into a deep crevice of newly dried lava one night. When I was helped up by a friend, I was unscathed, not one scratch! We screamed with surprise that I wasn’t bloody. Mahealani explained to me later what I had done and how Pele taught me a lesson and she did!
    Humbled by my actions, starting to feel how I fit into this powerful place. I know this as a warrior — biivouak is a fitting word. For me it means: finding a place to protect myself, while also nurturing myself with the spirit of Pele, her people and her island.

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Joel W. Cohen      Mr. Cohen was born and bread in Brooklyn . His early life was spent planning his escape to Connecticut . For most of his life he has been self-employed usually working on secret projects. By agreements with his partners he is unable to disclose the nature of these projects.

    Mr. Cohen was high-schooled as a scientist, colleged as an engineer and graduate-schooled as a computer-scientist.  As a result he is totally incapable of empathizing with artists and those that are spiritually motivated. Nevertheless he is known to engage people in long and potentially intimidating conversations with almost anyone on any topic much to their dismay. 

    As a young man in college Mr. Cohen performed as a free-lance hypnotist usually against the will of his subjects, a technique which he subsequently found useful during the 1980’s when he founded, developed and sold a high tech networking company.

     During the madness of the Internet Era of the last millennium Mr. Cohen jointly founded an Internet company called Takes.com. This company was approved for a public offering by the SEC after which the SEC issued a cease and desist order regarding activating the web site on the Internet.  His partner will only allow him to disclose that this web site did not involve sex, gambling or in any way cater to the seven deadly sins, excluding greed of course. 

    Mr. Cohen has often been described as a madman and for the last three years he has been institutionalized in his home office or more properly he has turned his home office into an institution.  When asked what he does he describes himself as a consultant though he rarely consults with anyone. None of Mr. Cohen’s poetry or prose has ever been published nor are their currently plans to do so.

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