I know nothing of physics or, indeed, of mathematics. I often wish i did. But the thing in this article that riveted my attention is this statement:
“You can’t really enter into “another dimension” as science fiction would have you believe. Instead, dimensions are how we experience the world.”
That’s what Rita said, too. It came through me, but it isn’t anything I know.
My March 2017 column for The Echo
Conspiracies of Men and God
by Frank DeMarco
In conspiracies, as in politics, there are no final victories.
Notice, this is not to say that conspiracies never succeed. Often enough, they do, in whole or in part. Often enough, their effects are disastrous. Nobody who lived through the aftermath of the murder – and the subsequent cover-up of the murder – of John F. Kennedy needs instruction on just how disastrous the effects can be.
But not even the most successful conspiracy can control life.
I know that’s what we fear. In our worst nightmares, we see ourselves entering the dystopias of 1984 or Brave New World. God knows, we see enough signs around us that we are on a slippery slope, and sliding faster and faster. Our feelings are screaming to us that we may be in the last days of the republic.
Well, maybe so. But maybe not. Often enough, strong feelings are less a natural reaction to events than a reflection of our fears. Fear often throws shadows on our nighttime walls, shadows that may be mistaken for reality. It is one thing to know, as a general rule, that conspiracies do sometimes occur, and do sometimes succeed. It is a very different thing to know whether this or that specific allegation is true. Feeling something strongly is not proof that our feelings are correct.
Here’s something to consider. Even if our worst fears are correct, the consequences that follow will be vastly different from what anyone on any side desires or predicts.
For many years, I intended to write a novel showing that people are always conspiring, but that even when a specific conspiracies succeeds, unanticipated effects follow. I was going to call it Conspiracies of Men and God, to express the fact that life is always larger than our ability to master it.
Consider the remarkable career of Charles de Gaulle. When you read his wartime memoirs, what stands out is that, from 1940 onward, his career might be looked at as an example of a benign conspiracy. Beginning alone, with no official position, no army, no treasury, in five years he rebuilt the essentials of the French state. He did it by knowing what needed to be done, and feeling his way toward the means to do it. But the point is, he was no one-man-band. In order to do what needed to be done, he had to attract others to his standard, and had to find necessary resources.
But even that miraculously successful conspiracy – call it that – could only go so far. After the war, politics as usual resumed, and he recognized that his choices were only three: to become a dictator, which would be self-defeating; to allow himself to be coopted into the system, which would destroy the moral authority he had accumulated in five years of struggle, or to retire until his country might call him again, which, in 1958, it did. This man who had rebuilt a state could mold circumstances only so far.
Or, on the other hand, consider the complementary career of Adolf Hitler, the head of a very successful malign conspiracy which took over a state, for a while threatened to take over the world, and then brought itself and Europe into ruin. He was not a one-man-band either. His henchmen, Goering, Goebbels, Himmler, etc., planned and executed the takeover of the German state, then, in six years, sowed the wind that first overshadowed all of Europe, and then, in another six years, reaped the whirlwind.
These creatures of hatred knew how to whistle up the demons that lurked in the hearts of the German people following their dreadful sufferings of the two decades following 1914. Once in control of the German state, they whistled up demons in the countries around them, demons whose shrieks evoked fear and trembling. And then Hitler’s conspiracy, like de Gaulle’s, found itself unable to impose itself upon the world.
(Unlike de Gaulle’s conspiracy, Hitler’s evil called forth the forces that would destroy it. I sometimes think that the worst effect of evil is that it calls forth forces that will destroy it. If Hitler had never existed, would we be living in the shadow of the atomic bomb?)
These are dark times, and nobody knows if this is the darkness of midnight or the darkness before the dawn. That there are conspiracies being woven around us seems clear enough, but no one alive can see what the net effect of so many contending efforts will be.
But no matter who dark things get, sooner or later daylight always returns. And no matter how strong the forces of evil, or even of good for that matter, it is worth remembering that nobody ever succeeds in bending all of life to their design.
I found this very helpful.
http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-oe-0407-silk-ring-theory-20130407-story.html
My February 2017 column for The Echo.
On love and fear
By Frank DeMarco
February – the month of Valentine’s Day. Eros and agape and chocolate hearts and flowers and “be my valentine” and all that. All about love.
Love?
Pontius Pilate was wasting his time, asking “what is truth?” He would have gotten much better ratings, even retrospectively, if he had asked “what is love?” (And Jesus wasn’t answering about truth, chances are he wouldn’t have answered this one either.) Pretty nearly everybody in the audience would have been interested in the question, and we are now, and our distant descendants will be just as interested whenever life poses the question to them.
But what is love? A Course in Miracles, among others, says that love and fear form the ultimate polarity. (They could equally well be expressed as hope and despair, or openness and barriers.) You might say, love is the overcoming of separateness; fear is the reinforcing of separateness.
Love, in this context, is not warm fuzzy feelings, or sentiment, or romance. It is the binding energy, rather like gravity, that not only “makes the world go ‘round,” but makes the world. It is the interpenetration of being, the fundamental oneness of everything. It is to life what flesh is to bodies. No love, no life.
Love and fear are not so much transient emotions as opposing but interconnected tendencies. As one expands, the other contracts. As you move more toward love, you automatically move away from fear, and vice-versa. When the other expands, the first contracts. They’re always both in play. We live between these extremes, and we choose, day by day, moment by moment, which pole we move toward. Think of our life as a spiral: we spiral out toward expansion (love) and we spiral in toward contraction (fear).
Where we habitually position ourselves on the spiral defines the life we lead. What we experience through our senses persuades us that we are all separate, and from that perception of separation comes the perception of lack of control, which creates fear. Eliminate the perception of separation and fear goes out the window. This is what love does.
You might envision it this way.
Draw a coil and imagine the coil suspended in space between a positive and negative charge. Each opposing charge pulls on the spiral. It should be clear that any point on the spiral is either exactly equidistant between the two forces, or closer to one or to the other. So there can be only three states relative to the forces: plus, zero, or minus.
(In this case, plus and minus have nothing to do with good and evil. This is just a mechanical analogy.)
If you are traveling on a spiral (and, in effect, we are) the oscillation between polarities is regular, predictable, and useful. It subjects us to ever-varying influences within which to exercise our free will to determine who we wish to become. Some times favor some purposes and are unfavorable for others. Of course it isn’t nearly this simple. Our lives don’t revolve around one spiral. Instead we have spirals within spirals, some contradicting others, some in harmonic resonance with others, some not interacting with others in any system that is obvious to you. Thus we might say that every moment of our life is uniquely favorable for something; and more or less favorable for other things, and indifferent for still other things. The only thing constant is change itself.
Children in their natural state freely express love. (“Unless you become as little children,” Jesus said, “you can’t enter the kingdom.”) As we age, we can become relatively dead to love, as we can be relatively dead to life itself, and for the same reason. Fortunately, once we know what’s wrong, we can work to set it right. No matter where you are right now on the ability-to-love scale, you can teach yourself to love more deeply, more easily.
Here’s a simple daily exercise to help you to practice love, extend your consciousness and your openness, and grow. It’s not complicated or difficult. It just requires doing.
Find some object to love. It can be a pet or a flower or an abstraction or a car, though it would be better if it were a person. Do it! If you have difficulty doing it, go back in your mind to some time when you loved or felt loved. Experience that feeling again; call it up, and express it toward whatever recipient you have chosen.
As you practice this, day by day, raise the bar by successively practicing loving something that’s less lovable. Anyone can love a dog, because the dog thinks you’re wonderful. It takes a little more to love a cat, because the cat thinks it’s wonderful. It takes more to love a woodchuck, because a woodchuck doesn’t care one way or the other. It takes more to love a rattlesnake, because it’s harder to relate to – especially if you’re afraid of it. So you could easily raise the bar a little bit every day, just by aiming to love something that is continually a little bit less loveable.
If we are to live in health, if we are to help others heal, we must live in love as best we can from day to day. It isn’t just hearts and flowers. It’s life.
Recently at The Monroe Institute, there was a sighting that was both common and extremely rare.
Common, because turkey vultures, or buzzards as some people call them, can be seen all the time, doing their lazy figure-eights in the sky, looking for carrion.
Rare, because these birds are rarely seen at very close range, and rare in that the sighting, given the context, seemed to mean something.
https://www.monroeinstitute.org/blog/totem-animal-lands-tmi
So glad Michael Ventura is writing for publication again.
I’m just back from two weeks at The Monroe Institute, and i haven’t even read all my email yet, but I thought I’d pass this along, hot from the presses.
https://www.austinsun.us/single-post/2017/05/01/Ventura-at-4am
This interesting story is an example of the half-empty glass: Is it good, is it bad, or is it just life? Either way, it supports what I firmly believe, which is that nature isn’t nearly as fragile as people sometimes fear it is.