THUNDERBROOM

November 1

Dear Janet:

So you actually want me to tell to you how to fly on a broom?

Are you sure you want to know? Flying through the air on a broomstick happens to be dangerous. There are dozens of things which can go wrong every moment you're aloft. I cannot begin to count the number of near catastrophes I've experienced whenever I climb on board my broomstick and take to the skies. Of course, this is only to be expected. Ask anyone, and they'll tell you that no matter what I try to do, I always manage to screw it up. The fact that I am one of the very few witches in our post-modern world who has figured out how to fly on a broom is quite beside the point. I am not the best person in the world to give instructions to anyone about anything, including something as eccentric as flying on a broom. Maybe I'm a witch, but I must surely be one of the most dysfunctional witches who has ever circled planet earth. If you think I have something valuable to communicate to you, your marbles must be dropping out of your head one by one.

My dear niece, I should think that you have too much on your mind already. You've just completed your junior year in college, and you've only got one more year before you get your degree. You're already doing everything right, namely attending a good art school in Chicago and preparing for a career. You don't need to complicate your life by flying over Cook County on a broomstick. Stop and think for a moment what would happen if you tried it. There you would be up in the air, a solitary human figure on nothing but a flimsy little stick, zooming over Michigan Avenue. You would immediately cause a twenty car pile-up, people would drop dead on the sidewalks, and El trains would run off their tracks. Do you want this on your conscience?

One of the first times I flew over this town, I nearly killed someone. I am not kidding. I mean there I was, soaring through the air on my broom, really getting into it, swooping around like I've seen the crows do, buzzing the trees and the telephone poles, and having a good, old-fashioned blast. Idiot that I was, I didn't realize that I must have been clearly visible from the ground. It was only about 11:00 p.m., and lots of lights were still on. All of a sudden I realized that there was a man standing below me, staring up with the most stupefied expression of horror that I have ever seen in my life. Being the brilliantly perceptive person that I am, I realized that the spectacle of a witch on a broomstick was not something that people in Carver, Illinois normally see every day. Granted I wasn't wearing a pointed hat or anything, just jeans and a t-shirt, but I must have looked like something out of his worst nightmares. The poor guy seemed about to keel over onto his driveway. I was so aghast that I nearly went splat into a telephone pole, which would have served me right. For a moment I hovered in the air wondering what I should do. Then he seemed to recover. He threw his beer can into the bushes and staggered into the house.

I waited a few minutes, and after making sure no one else was around, I descended. Very cautiously I went to his living room window and peeked indoors. I could see him sitting on his sofa staring vacantly into space, his face as white as unbuttered popcorn. He was still breathing, if only barely. I debated for a moment whether I should knock on his door and tell him that I was a nobody named Mona Wilcox who didn't want to spook him or anybody, but I finally decided that this would only make matters worse. There was nothing to do except make an undignified retreat. But I doubt that the poor guy ever got over the jolt that I had given him.

I spent the next few weeks kicking myself for being so stupid. How could I have been dumb enough to fly over a town like Carver, where I could be seen at any time? Ever since that night I've been careful to fly only when the moon is dark, and I avoid both the populated areas and the Interstate. I also fly as high as I can so that all I am is a tiny dot in the sky—and this is more fun anyway. In a small town like Carver, evasive techniques like these can be managed. But they won't work Chicago. My dear Janet, get real. Granted I don't know that much about Chicago, but I do know there are a heck of a lot of people up there, and a witch flying around on a broom is going to get herself noticed.

At this point in your life, it is better for you to devote yourself to your studies. Count your blessings that you are attending a great college where you might actually learn something. At least you're no longer stuck in Carver. I don't know how many times I've wished I lived in a more interesting environment, like Greenwich Village perhaps, or a rose-covered cabin in the mountains, somewhere east of the sun and west of the moon. But no, here I am, living out my life in the splendid prairie metropolis of Carver, Illinois, where there's never anything to do except drink beer and watch the pigs fuck.

Keep in touch,

Mona

* * *

November 12

All, right—so you aren't going to let me off the broomstick hook that easily. You are certain that you can fly a broomstick as well as I can, and you promise that once you get the hang of it, you'll wait until you come back to Carver next summer to give it a try. All of which means that there is no rational reason why I can't tell you everything I know. I guess this makes elementary common sense, and as you know I am a great believer in elementary common sense. But there is another problem. I wish that I could just write up a few paragraphs explaining my broomstick secrets, and then you could take to the skies as easily as me. Unfortunately it's not that simple—if it were, absolutely everybody on planet earth would be flying around on their own brooms. You must understand that it takes more than reciting a spell or waving a magic wand in order to get up into the air on a broom. This silly hobby of mine is not just a pastime, it's an entire way of being in the world. I am certain that you can never get a broomstick to fly unless you have developed your own personal philosophy of life, one which you've put together after many years of careful study.

This is the problem. It isn't possible for you to take my philosophy, climb onto a broomstick, and then zap into the air. One of the first things I discovered when I began to study witchcraft is that what works for one witch will seldom work for another. Janet, at this point in your life you could make a start in developing your own personal philosophy, but you won't have enough time to think it through. Me, I'm fifty-five years old, and I actually do think I've got a few things figured out. This is something of a relief, since I've always been convinced that if I ever did have a philosophy of life, one day I might actually start to live it. The funny thing is that in recent years I've started to do precisely that. Not that I do it all the time, but what's weird is that sometimes I really do manage it. This is what has gotten me off the ground, not any kind of idiotic magic spell.

The core of my system is witchcraft. It was not until I was in my middle thirties that I realized that I was a witch. This was a disorienting discovery. Witchcraft? The only thing I knew about witches were those three Weird Sisters in Shakespeare's Macbeth. And what dismal lives did those old biddies live, spending their time putting curses on their neighbors, worshipping Beelzebub, and stirring up glop in the cauldron. "Double, double, toil and trouble," they sing in Macbeth[1], and girls like these you don't want to invite over for pizza. But the more I started learning about witchcraft, the more obvious it became that I had been doing witchy things my whole life. Until then I had always figured I was just a leftover countercultural type who had never completely sold out. Most members of my generation yuppified as soon as it was conveniently possible, and as far as I'm concerned they deserve all the bills they can never manage to pay. But I have never had any use for the values, habits, and concerns of mainstream American culture. I realized when still a teenager that I was not going to work myself to death to purchase a lifestyle I would be too exhausted to enjoy. Nor did I want television to occupy the whole of my consciousness. There was too much living I wanted to do. And it was specifically going to be a Mother Earth News kind of living, where I could exist as close to the earth as possible. So for most of my adult life I have tended my gardens, experimented with herbs, distilled cordial waters, canned vegetables, baked bread, and communed with the moon. I don't have kids, but I do have a dog, my dearest Ralph, and he and I understand each other perfectly. 

If this isn't being a witch, I don't know what is. Not that I'm any kind of wicked witch, mind you—I am instead what used to be known as a "white witch" or a village wise woman. Once upon a time you could find a wise woman in every town. They birthed the baby and laid out the dead, cured illnesses of both people and animals, ensured the fertility of crops, prepared love charms, drove off bad weather, and performed other beneficial services. Any village without a competent wise woman was in trouble. This isn't Satanism. Frankly I have no idea what Satanists are, except that they seem to be distinctly rotten creeps who have bizarre ways of getting their jollies. Me, I wouldn't recognize a Satanist if one clunked me in the head with his cloven hoof, assuming that they actually have hooves.

So here I am, living out my life as an anachronistic witch, and let's face it, witches are of little or no use to anyone these days. But it is the only way of life that made sense to me. It's interesting to hear that it feels right to you, too, which means that you're way ahead of me than I was at your age. Nowadays, I wish that I had realized I was a witch when I was younger—it would have saved me from a lot of wrong turns and ridiculous mistakes. So what if being a witch is something of a useless relic in our post-modern world? It happens to be a tremendously fun way to live. But—and here I go again!—at this point in your life, you should forget about trying to be a witch. You need to get an education. Then you can start in on other stuff, including developing your own philosophy of life and getting up in the air on a broomstick. There will be plenty of time for that in the future.

Keep smiling,

Mona

* * *

December 4

Janet, sweetie—thanks for telling me you don't think I'm a complete lunatic. This is always good to hear, at least once in a while. As a matter of fact, you are one of the few human beings in my life who doesn't think I'm completely off my nut. I just wish you were a sixty year old guy and happily divorced. Then maybe I could finally get a date. Sometimes I think I must be crazy, not about the broomstick, of course, which is a sign of perfect sanity, but about the fact that I'm still dreaming about finding the right man and living happily ever after. This, after my colossally dismal record with men. I can just imagine what I'm in for if I ever do find a guy who's even minimally attractive and then tell him the truth about myself: "By the way, honey, I hope you don't mind, but I've got this peculiar hobby." Right. Yes, well, it's been nice knowing you, too, and goodbye, Charlie.

Of course, he wouldn't believe that I really do fly. He would immediately conclude that I'm hooked on drugs or something. But I do not do drugs, unless you think that the green tea I swallow is a drug. I am not even mildly schizophrenic. Mona Wilcox is nothing more than a practical, sane, unaffected civil service worker of the state of Illinois who has figured out how to get around in the air on a piece of wood. What could be more normal than that?

You must understand that my aerial hobby is not that unusual. Lots of people, and not just witches, have managed to fly through the air for many centuries now. Are you aware that there are numerous recorded instances of Tibetan lamas who were able to float into the clouds any time they pleased? There are also plenty of stories about Indian fakirs who could levitate. Your average medieval alchemist, pre-historic shaman, and Native American medicine man also knew a trick or two about getting off the ground. Broomstick or not, defying gravity has been happening throughout human history. Consider, for example, the story of Bladud, one of the mythical kings of Britain. Bladud was King Lear's father way back in Dark Age Britain. Geoffrey of Monmouth, writing in the 12th century, states:

This prince was a very ingenious man, and taught necromancy in his kingdom, nor did he leave off pursuing his magical operations, till he attempted to fly to the upper region of the air with wings which he had prepared, and fell upon the temple of Apollo in the city of Trinovantum, where he was dashed to pieces . . . [2]

So here you have a perfectly legitimate historical account of human flight, one of the earliest ever recorded, but one which is always dismissed as a fantasy. Well, not by me—I can recognize an authentic account when I see it. And in my studies of other medieval records I have found plenty of evidence that Bladud wasn't the only human in European history to levitate. In more recent times, for example, we have the example of Leonardo da Vinci and his elaborate flying machines (yes, I know that he never managed to get off the ground, but his devices are so fascinating that they should have worked). Then there was Cyrano de Bergerac, and here I'm referring to the real 17^th century Frenchman instead of the character in the play. This Cyrano wrote a book called Voyage to the Moon, in which he carefully describes exactly how he managed to levitate:

At length I set out for Heaven in this manner. I planted my self in the middle of a great many Glasses full of Dew, tied fast about me; and upon which the Sun so violently darted his Rays, that the Heat, which attracted them, as it does the thickest Clouds, carried me up so high, that at length I found my self above the middle Region of the Air.[3]

When I first read Cyrano's account, I was immediately certain that such a brilliant idea must have worked perfectly. So if he had managed to get off the ground, I was convinced that there must have been hundreds of other human beings who had also done it over the centuries, including witches. It couldn't be that difficult. And take my word for it, it's not. Flying around on a broomstick is one of the easiest things in the world. I am only surprised that so few other post-modern witches haven't also figured it out for themselves.

It was about four years ago when I had my first breakthrough about the broom. It came one rainy afternoon after I had spent several hours examining medieval witch trial records. You must understand that when I first became interested in the wise woman tradition, I spent many long days at the University of Illinois library going through all kinds of scholarly books, trying to find out everything I could about pre-modern wise women. But what I discovered, alas, was that very little has been recorded. Aristotle's wife Phythias, for instance, was celebrated as a herbalist and wise woman, but that is the only thing which is known about her—she died young, and anything that she thought, felt, or believed has disappeared forever. So has practically everything else. The more research I did about historical wise women, the more I realized that even though scattered "magical spells" have survived, none of these women left any kind of written record.

On this particular afternoon, there I sat in the UIUC library, frustrated as usual and wondering for the hundredth time why nobody had bothered to write down exactly how witches managed to fly. Then I stopped in surprise. It occurred to me that if I could discover exactly why these women were flying on their broomsticks, I could figure out how they did it. In all the literature that I had read, I realized that no one, neither the inquisitors at the trials nor modern commentators, had ever bothered to ask themselves exactly why witches were bothering to fly around on broomsticks. The superficial answer was that they were heading off to a witches' Sabbath, or so most historians believe. However, as far as I was concerned, this made no sense. Common sense told me that a flying broomstick would have been an utterly reckless vehicle for transportation. The women who managed to get into the air would have spent a good deal of their time scared out of their wits and hanging on for dear life, especially if they were trying it for the first time. After all, you can never be sure of anything up there in the air. The unexpected would always be happening—a storm blowing up, or a flock of birds whizzing past you, or else you run smack into a cloud and you discover yourself lost in a misty void. And—let's face it—the mechanics of flying a broomstick are very flimsy, to say the least. How in the world would witches have been able to control their brooms once they were airborne? They wouldn't have had a flight control panel to give them any assistance. They couldn't even pull a rein and get the thing to turn left or right, for the obvious reason that a broom is not a horse.

Was I supposed to believe that medieval wise women were getting up into the air just to go to some kind of lousy party? And trying to haul cookies or cake along with them at the same time? Being the sensible women that they were, medieval witches would surely have used more conventional means of transportation to get from Point A to Point B. What was wrong with walking to the Sabbath, or riding a horse, or taking a cart? Brooms are good for sweeping the floor, elimination of cobwebs, and chasing the drunken husband out of the house, but that's about it. My guess was that the witches who took to the skies weren't going anywhere at all. I realized that this had never been truly appreciated, neither by scholars nor by modern broomstick practitioners. Well, I happen to be a Midwestern woman, and I like things to be practical. So I asked myself why any sane human being would want to propel herself several hundred feet up in the air with only a wooden shaft to hang on to. After much troublesome cogitation, I decided that the simple fact of escaping gravity had to be part of it. Medieval witches must have taken to the skies for the sheer fun of it. Granted this was a pretty pedestrian insight, but I decided that there was something to it.

Here I must confess that I have always intensely disliked gravity. Do you remember the old story about Sir Isaac Newton getting clunked in the head with an apple, by means of which he discovered gravity? This tale has always irritated me. It cannot have been pleasant for poor old Sir Isaac to get himself whacked in the noggin like that, even if he had been wearing one of those ridiculous 17^th century wigs. However, that is beside the point. All Newton did about gravity was discover it. A more rational response would have been to do something about it. Now I am willing to admit that gravity does have a practical purpose—it keeps the stuff on planet earth from flying off into space. But that is the only good thing you can say about it. Gravity happens to be a great nuisance. It makes things fall down instead of up, so you are always having to clean up messes. It constantly pulls at the muscles of your face so you hate the way you look by the time you're in your forties. Worst of all: it can turn into a psychic tendency which can make you complacent, settled, and smug. Anyone with a brain in her head wants to escape all that downwardness, at least occasionally. Birds are the only creatures on earth who don't have a problem with gravity. They can free themselves from it whenever they choose.

Feeling free and happy like a bird . . . maybe this was what witches were after. Getting up into the air on a flying broomstick would have been one of the most liberating experiences they could have known. Being able to soar upwards into boundless space . . . if that isn't the ultimate in earthly freedom, I don't know what is. Upwardness. Verticality. Participating in the vastness of the sky instead of just looking at it. Upwardness counts. Upwardness matters. Most people don't bother about upwardness in their lives, but I discovered a long time ago that in many ways, upwardness is the key to an emancipated existence. It's one of the most psychically sane sensations you can experience. A feeling of verticality can take you completely out of yourself into a marvelous new way of being. Have you ever noticed that when you develop a new perspective or see something in a new way, the sensation moves you upward? Not just upward but into a feeling of expansion? When something rises into the sky, it becomes more beautiful, more free, and—more spiritual.

This is it. This is the secret to flying on a broomstick.

Witches started flying around on broomsticks because it gave them an experience of spiritual liberation. They were using their brooms to experience something which most of us poor mortals never quite get, a feeling of freedom that was more than political, more than personal—it was a sensation of profound spiritual intensity. In other words, it was a way to achieve a mystical understanding of the universe without having to bother about any kind of religious tradition, dogma, or authority. After all, any kind of experience which raises you up can provide you with spiritual revelation. Throughout history poets and visionaries have always sensed this about upwardness, which is why the greatest poets are always coming up with vertical metaphors. What could be more liberating than escaping from the dirt beneath your feet and moving into the glittering firmament above you?

Janet, have you ever really taken a good hard look at the sky? It's amazing how few people ever bother to lift their eyes and actually notice it. The sky provides us with perhaps the most spacious vision of freedom that we can ever know. Not even the wide horizons of the ocean or the most majestic mountains can compare to the limitless and constantly expanding sky. I don't know how the sky looks in Europe or Asia, but here in Illinois, right smack on the wide-open prairie, one thing we've always got is plenty of sky. So never mind that nonsense about witches using their brooms to fly to a dreary little Sabbath, where you had to worship the Devil or something. Witches took to the skies because it made them feel spiritually free. For a few hours at least, a good medieval witch would have been liberated from the crap in her life, up to and including her dull routines, her oppressive culture, her lack of human rights, and—most importantly—her repressive religion. And was there anything more oppressive in the Middle Ages than the heavy hand of institutionalized Christianity? How wondrous it must have felt to climb upon your trusty little broomstick and ascend upwards into the immensity of the cosmos! A flying broomstick was a vehicle of liberation, the way Zen is supposed to be a way of liberation.

Phew! My letters seem to be getting longer. Maybe I'm getting carried away. You'll have to wait a week for the next installment. Besides, I do have a life besides the broom, even if I can't ever get a date.

As always,

Mona

* * *

December 12

You tell me that nothing which I've said so far makes sense. And you don't understand what spiritual liberation would have to do with flying on a broomstick. Janet, my dear, this is the one single concept you must understand if you want to fly. Spiritual liberation. An idea which hardly anyone ever thinks about.

Has it ever occurred to you that the only thing most religious systems hand you is imprisonment? Or that you cannot live any kind of valid existence if you allow yourself to unthinkingly adhere to an institutionalized religion? The weight of an antiquated belief system is probably the single most oppressive burden we humans can experience. It can keep you from the joys of spiritual freedom more effectively than any political tyrant. Here you might wonder what I'm talking about when I say spiritual freedom. Mental freedom? Physical? Emotional? Is having your own personal philosophy spiritual freedom? No—and yes. I don't know if I can precisely define what I'm talking about when I speak of spiritual liberation, but I can say that it comes from a feeling I have about what lies hidden behind the physical world which surrounds us. Janet, have you ever noticed that when things become completely silent, you can sense a sound behind the silence? Mind you, this sound isn't something you actually hear—it's a strange sort of something that you can only sense or feel. But you're certain that it's there. And what's interesting about it is that it is the sound of laughter, of pure unadulterated happiness, as if all the living beings in the universe were singing with joy. Me, I've felt this sound many times in my life. It always tells me that that there really is some sort of living spiritual reality in the universe, somewhere beyond the three dimensional space and time which we know in our ordinary lives. If you can let yourself go into the space behind the silence, you will feel yourself becoming completely and utterly free. 

Now I am very much aware that there is more than one kind of freedom in this world. No one can even begin to think about spiritual freedom unless political and economic freedoms come first. But any old Stoic will tell you that even if you are in the most horrendous political situation or in the most servile condition, you can still be mentally and spiritually free. Indeed, if you are free of external tyrannies, it is almost a sacred duty to free yourself spiritually. The only liberation which can do you any kind of good is spiritual.

Here I must pause for a short digression.

You must understand that as a left-over countercultural type who has no use for the standard American values of money, status, and shopping malls, I can only say, along with Emily Brontë, give me liberty. The one and only thing which has mattered to me throughout my life is freedom. It is the core of my values. When I was a kid, the only thing I wanted to do with my life was light out for the Territory, where I was certain I would be able to find perfect freedom. The Territory, remember, was the destination of the most famous American kid of all, the celebrated Huckleberry himself, and to my ten-year-old mind it seemed the only desirable thing to do with my life. The fact that I was a girl didn't seem to matter. But by mid-20^th century, the American frontier was over and done with. The world I was living in was a constrictive, boring middle-class society, filled with tedious gossip and small-minded rivalries. There is no greater hell on earth than being a nice, conventional middle-class American girl, except perhaps being a nice, conventional, middle-class American wife. I wanted to be free of parents, teachers, rules, and regulations. But I also dreaded the thought of living out my life as a handmaiden to some employer, chained to a gigantic ball and chain called a paycheck. I wanted to be my own boss and live exactly as I pleased. I wanted a cabin in the wilderness where I could enjoy a truly organic life—no telephones, no clocks, no electricity, water from the well, and food from the earth. I would dress in my own homespun fabric and cook sourdough bread in a cast iron frying pan. This was my idea of an earthly paradise, land, lots of land under starry skies above.

But I was very much aware that if you got into a car and headed west, you would only end up in the traffic jams of California. Even if you went north to Alaska, you would only find office jobs, middle class neighborhoods, and supermarkets. The Territory as a real physical space didn't exist any longer. I finally realized that even if there was no escape to the Territory, I could still try to live as free a life as possible. This was what a lot of people were still trying to do in those days, before the country turned yuppie. In the late Sixties and Seventies you could find plenty of countercultural books to help you devise your own alternative lifestyle, including Living Poor with Style by Ernest Callenbach and Jack Kerouac's The Dharma Bums. One book published in 1966 made a special impression on me: Ann Rogers' A Cookbook for Poor Poets and Others. Believe it or not, this last turned into one of the most meaningful books I have ever encountered.

Here I must confess to an eccentric tendency: being someone who loves to cook, I have always felt that a superior cookbook is more than a collection of recipes. A good cookbook can be a work of literature, a source of inspiration, or even a treatise on the meaning of life. It can change your entire existence for the better. Elizabeth David's cookbooks are like this: they can transport you into a whole new way of being where the most astounding enjoyment can be had from the simplest ingredients. This is what happened to me when I first read A Cookbook for Poor Poets. This recipe collection happens to be one of the most beautiful, invigorating, and enchanting books ever published. Rogers starts off by talking about simple dinners during the Depression: "they were always gala. There was always wine. And there was always fresh bread and butter." Mind you, her bread is the real old-fashioned kind: "a big fresh roll—the French or Italian kind—the crust shattering with the first bite . . . It smells of yeast and wheatfields and waterfalls and salt flats . . . its very texture requires slow and careful munching, and each crumb must be picked up . . ." Rogers goes on to provide some of the most exquisite recipes you could imagine: Dutch rijstaffel ("for the really mad poet, who wants to celebrate in the grand manner"), Leckerlein, dhall curry, olive tiles, Pilaf Omar, and cats'lleatit.[4] I must acknowledge that Rogers has a tendency to rely on drab post-war conveniences like canned beans and bouillon cubes, but her recipes are mostly cheap, filling, and inspiring.

This little cookbook turned into my bible. The moment I read it I knew exactly how I wanted to live out my life, namely as a poor poet. I didn't want a career weighed down with meaningless yuppie comforts—I wanted to live a life that was filled with rhythm and creation and richness of experience. Rogers' cookbook told me that living your life as a poet, or at least cultivating a poetical sensitivity, was the key. If I could make a life for myself that was filled with melody, inspiration, and vision, not to mention an endless number of delightful meals, I would be able to enjoy all the wonders of the universe. This would be a life lived deliberately, in the best Thoreauvian manner, or as Jack Kerouac says in The Dharma Bums, "the joyous life in America without much money".[5] I didn't need to light out for the Territory to free myself—I simply had to turn myself into a poet, preferably one who would never get herself published.

Well, after thirty years, at least I've succeeded in the latter, so I guess I should count my blessings. I've never managed to earn one red cent from my writings, and I probably never will. So I've ended up as a ball-and-chain office drone who collects her paychecks like everyone else. Maybe I would have had a happier life if I had been able to earn an income as an independent writer, but maybe not. Things could be worse, I guess. Lots of poets, like Constantine Cavafy and Fernando Pessoa, have had office jobs, and they didn't go insane. The only good thing about my job is that my salary has never been more than a pittance. I manage to pay the bills each month, but that's about it. I can't afford to waste my time in the great American dead-end game called retail therapy. My life comes from what I create, not what I buy, so I can still live for art instead of money. There is time for spontaneity, adventure, new ideas, and new ways of doing things in my life. Outside of the office I actually think that I am master of my fate, with plenty of free mental space. Mental space happens to be pretty darn good space, too. Get yourself enough of it, and you have time to read, reflect, and figure things out on your own. So what if I have to bow down before my supervisors, get caught up in office politics, and spend too much time processing invoices? Life could be worse.

Here I must admit that my attempts to live a liberated life are just a fantasy. But even if my delusion of mental liberation is only a subjective kind of reality, it feels valid. As valid as the life of my greatest heroine, Emily Brontë. Emily Brontë didn't need to light out for the Territory in order to be free. She was able to emancipate herself right there on the barren Yorkshire moors, in spite of the restrictions of Victorian Britain and the rotten governess jobs she had to endure. It is true that she had to outwardly conform to the strictures of the society she lived in, but mentally she was obeyed no law but her own. I doubt that Emily ever managed to fly around Yorkshire on a broomstick, but every line of her poetry shows that she had no trouble achieving authentic spiritual freedom. All of which means that lighting out for the Territory is nothing, absolutely nothing, compared to lighting up. It's time to go back to the broomstick, Janet my dear. You don't need to head west to find freedom—you've just got to get yourself a practical little broomstick. And presto! You will free yourself not just of terrestrial woes, but of lifeless spiritual concepts as well. Upwardness is the perfect spiritual fix. It can expand your consciousness like nothing else on planet earth. Appreciating the physical reality of the world that surrounds us is one thing, but it's hardly enough to help us understand the true nature of existence. What we need to do is see into the heart of things and gain some understanding of the true nature of reality. I am deluded enough to think that upwardness can do this for anybody.

I hope I'm finally starting to make sense. Cheers . . .

Mona

* * *

December 20

Janet, what do you mean you've bought some kind of idiot plastic broom at Dollar General for $7.98? And now you want me to cease and desist with my dimwit digressions and tell you how you're supposed to get off the ground? My dear young idiot, these dimwit digressions happen to be necessary. You are in dire need of every last one of them, especially if you think that you can start flying through the air on a plastic broom. Good grief—can you be serious? Is it not obvious that only a special kind of broomstick is going to get you off the ground? What kind of education are you getting there in Chicago, anyway?

Sweetie, you must understand that a factory-created broom is a pleasant little artifact, but if you attempt to ascend with it, guess what happens? Absolutely nothing. A factory broomstick will not get you up, nor will it get you down, left, right, backwards, or forwards. It won't get you anywhere, period. You will stand there on the ground, trapped by gravity and feeling like a total idiot, which is also how you will look. Should your dog meander along at this critical junction, I guarantee that he will start howling with merriment. All of which means that if you want to fly, you need the right kind of broomstick. And through a long, interminable and lethally boring process of trial and error, I finally discovered how to create one for yourself. So you had better settle down for another digression. 

The operative word here is create. You cannot purchase a flying broomstick—you have to make it yourself. You must understand that a flying broomstick is not just a spiritual conveyance, it also happens to be an extremely virtuous way to transport yourself. That's right: it engenders not only a feeling of spiritual liberation but of virtue as well. Now I have always like the idea of virtue, probably because I only rarely see it manifesting in the world around me. Virtue is a very positive human quality. It can do people a lot of good. Over the years I have expended a lot of energy in studying how the greatest thinkers have defined virtue, especially since so many of them believe that plain virtue is the only way to achieve happiness. I have concluded that one the best ways to get virtue into your guts is through the whole idea of making. Virtue is not just an ethical precept. It can be engendered through the act of creation. When you create something with your own hands in the right way, you are being virtuous—even if you're doing something as ordinary as making dinner or sewing a dress. Janet, as an artist you have probably figured out that whenever you are absorbed in what you are doing, you are flourishing to the best of your abilities. But there's more to it than that. You have to use your whole being—body, mind and spirit—to focus on what you are doing. A flying broomstick isn't going to make it into the air unless it's been crafted by a human being whose energies are working together in virtuous harmony.

So here you have it, the first step in getting a broom to fly, namely making the darn thing yourself. Step two is also very simple. If you want to get off the ground on a broomstick, you've got to start laughing. That's right—laughing. No, Janet darling, that isn't another of my dumb jokes. Laughter happens to matter in getting a broomstick fly. You need to think about what kind of natural force can counteract gravity. The answer is obvious: levity. The opposite of gravity is levity, that joyous sound behind the silence. Here I must again explain myself in more detail. As you know, what with me and love of poetry, I simply adore words. They have always had a kind of magic for me. I love how they come out of your throat, how they look on a sheet of paper, and how they rhyme and flow and resonate. I relish the impact that they can have, I can go into rapture whenever they fit together in poetry, and most of all, I'm fascinated with their history. The history of words can tell us more about truth or reality than the heaviest historical tome. When I was pondering my broomstick upwardness problem, it occurred to me that by researching the history of the word levity, I might get a clue how to achieve it.

Levity comes from the Latin levare, to rise. It also has some connection with levitas or leuitas, levis being the Latin for light. Light not only in the sense of brightness but also of weightlessness. So the original lev sound had a sense of both rising and light, which is a perfect natural connection. The lev sound can today be found in words such as alleviate, leverage, relieve, levitate, and elevator. Bread rises because of a leaven. The Levant is the place where the light dawns. Relevant originally meant rising back up again. I concluded that if I wanted to fly on a broomstick, this was what I needed: lightness, lack of seriousness, buoyancy. Most contemporary witches who have tried to solve the broomstick conundrum have fallen into the trap of thinking that all you need is the right kind of magic spell to get the broom to fly. Nothing could be more useless. What you need is the right kind of lev, and then up you go.

This brings me to step three. Do you remember I said that you need some sort of personal philosophy to get up into the air? The core of this philosophy has to be free thought. Skeptical free thinking is the third essential quality a human being has to have in order to rise; I guarantee that you won't be able to lev one measly inch off the ground without it. Now I am aware that free thought can be one of the most difficult things in the world to acquire, particularly if you are emotionally caught up in a belief system or a relationship. But you cannot turn yourself into a flying witch if you go through life with too much baggage. The more you get rid of as they years go by, the lighter—and the freer—you are. One of the first things I discovered when I started to fly on my broom was that I always have to take my shoes off first. The broom won't budge an inch unless I am barefoot. Don't ask me why—this is just a broomstick law of some sort. There is no doubt in my mind that medieval witches figured it out as well. The witch who is overloaded with anything cannot soar. Unless she makes a conscious decision to jettison as much non-essential stuff as possible in her life, she isn't going anywhere, let alone upwards. This includes mental as well as physical stuff. The less the better. 

So first you need to make the broom yourself, then you need some levity in your life, and finally you need to keep your mind free and open. And then . . . Well, the next installment will have to wait, as I've got to go make dinner.

Mona.

P.S. Do you want to hear how my most recent Woman Seeking Man ad went? Do you even have to ask? I suppose it's my own fault—I never should have described myself as a "SWF, age 55, unsuccessful warbler of native woodnotes wild, with an interest in dogs, cauldrons, mystical transcendence, aerodynamics, and eye of newt. Seeks compatible male." And nobody was interested! Even though I wasn't dumb enough to mention the broom! Imagine that! What can possibly be wrong with the guys here in Illinois anyway?

* * *

January 17

Yes, you're right—the guys in Carver are too pedestrian. It's interesting to hear that you're running into the same problem in Chicago. This guy you met last week, he definitely sounds interesting. But all you had to do was tell him that you're an apprentice witch who intends to do some recreational broomstick flying next summer, and he immediately takes to his heels. Talk about all-American dork. Now here is a classic example of the value of spiritual liberation. This guy obviously believes that witches are rotten little hags who want to cast spells, conjure up demons, and do nasty things to law-abiding citizens such as himself. Janet, if he were able to exercise some independent judgment, he would see that you are an interesting and intelligent human being. But he obviously doesn't want to open his mind, nor will he attempt to think things through for himself. He will rely upon the received wisdom from his variety of organized religion for everything in his life. You are well rid of him, even if he did look like Brad Pitt.

Of course, the guy probably thinks that he does possess an open mind. Such is the sort of personality that organized religion generates, namely a complacent fool who is certain that his personal religious faith is both absolutely true and logically demonstrable, but who has never bothered to investigate any of its premises. These kind of people invariably conclude that followers of other religions are deluded, mad, evil, or in desperate need of elimination. So before we go further with the broomstick, I'm afraid I must again digress, this time about the nuisance of organized religion. This detour happens to be necessary, since the whole point of a flying broomstick is spiritual liberation, remember, something which you will never get from organized religion.

I came across some interesting statistics recently: of the six billion people currently inhabiting our planet, about two billion are Christians (equally divided between Protestants and Catholics), one billion are Moslems, one billion are Hindus, and maybe about half a billion are Buddhists or followers of other Asian religions. The rest follow smaller belief systems or indigenous tribal religions. A whopping 850 million people consider themselves atheists, agnostics, or secular humanists. What this means, quite simply, is that every single religion on planet earth is a minority religion. This is a difficult concept for people to assimilate. Most people who consider themselves religious are only dimly aware that from a planetary perspective, their own religion is followed only by a minority of human beings. Here in America, the predominant faith is Christian, and this tends to make us Americans believe that Christianity is the dominant religion in the world. But Christianity makes up only a measly one-third of the planet. It doesn't even come close to being a majority religion.

So one can only wonder why so many allegedly rational human beings convince themselves that their personal religion is the right one? Where does that leave most of the other people on planet earth? Presumably heading off to the burning fires of Hell, I guess, where your average religious fanatic thinks they belong. Not that anyone has ever seen the fires of Hell, let alone photographed them, but a good True Believer knows that they really do exist, somewhere, somehow. Janet, this is why a flying broomstick is so important. I still don't think you've grasped its basic essence, namely spiritual freedom. A flying broomstick can free you of everything that's keeping you from understanding the true nature of spiritual reality. You cannot be spiritually free if you allow your consciousness to be dominated by an organized belief system of any sort. Spiritual liberation and organized religions do not mix, period. The only thing an organized religion will hand you is a ticket to jail.

American society is, of course, saturated with the heavy hand of organized religion. What good these religions do I cannot say. Our First Amendment guarantees freedom of religion in this country, but as far as I'm concerned what we really need in this country is freedom from religion. Apart from the ghastly political tyrannies of the 20^th century, organized religion of whatever flavor has been the single most tyrannical, repressive, deadening, and destructive force in human history. This is only my opinion, of course, and it is a statement that good Christians, good Jews, good Buddhists, good Hindus, good Muslims, and good believers of whatever stripe would vehemently deny. We do nothing but good! you can hear them cry. We show people the truth about the Divine! We prepare the soul for life after death! You're never going to end up on Heaven or Nirvana or Paradise unless you listen to us! We're your ticket to eternity! Listen to us, or you'll regret it!

Ah, yes . . . that's the whole point. Eternity. What's going to happen to our immortal souls after death, out there in the vast cold aeon of time. Let's face it, eternity is what matters in any religious system. And since most people are the gullible creatures that they are, whenever people start to contemplate their own mortality some kind of lunatic emotional turmoil invariably kicks in. Maybe your car needs repair, and your kid is flunking biology, and your urinary track infection is flaring up. These can be managed. But what happens after death . . . why, that's what really counts! The afterlife is forever! Forever is going to last a really long time! We've got to get into that forever at all costs! And we can't do it without the right kind of religion! 

Janet, you need to think about the super-colossal enormity of forever for a moment. We get to live only a measly seventy years or so on this planet, but then, so we are assured, we enter into an existence which will go on and on and on and on and on and on into infinity. Even a billion years will only be a drop in the bucket of this infinity, not to mention a billion times a billion years, times another billion, times another. Now is this something, or isn't it? And it is an idea that has generated more emotional chaos than anything else throughout history. But how do we know that eternity is what we're in store for after death? The interesting thing about the afterlife is that no one has ever been there and back. It is the celebrated bourne from which no traveler has ever returned. As long as we are mortal human beings trapped in third-dimensional time and space, no one is ever going to know exactly what happens after death. Mind you, there have always been plenty of guesses about what we're in for once we breathe our last, but guesses are not demonstrable proof. As much as we poor mortals would like to know what will happen after death, nothing has ever been proved, and nothing ever will be. Maybe some of the guesses are more likely than some of the others, but who can say which ones?

It is interesting to remember that Eastern beliefs about life after death are categorically opposed to Western ideas of Heaven and Hell. They bear as little resemblance to each other as do elephants and fire hydrants. In the West we have visions of heaven or paradise or St. John the Divine's 1,500 mile-high city, along with hellfire, damnation, and the burning lake of fire for the bad guys. But where do these ideas come from? In the gospels Jesus has hardly anything to say about the afterlife, and it's left to St. John the Divine, who was not one of the original twelve disciples, to describe the New Jerusalem.[6] I have always wondered if he had eaten some bad fish on the day he envisioned his mile high city. Did he really see it with his own eyes? Or was he trying to convey his imaginative vision of the most powerful edifice that human beings could create? Well, nothing like this exists in Oriental religions. In the East, death is only a prelude to rebirth. You come back to earth to make another try in a world where you are repeatedly told that life is suffering. But Buddhists talk reincarnation only up to a point. As far as I can tell, there are no individual human beings in Buddhism, let alone individual human souls. True Buddhists feel that a human soul is nothing but an illusion. There is nothing to incarnate. You don't die because you were never born. So us entities are eventually going to end up as a drop in the Nirvana bucket or something like that. As a Westerner I'm not too thrilled at such an uninteresting prospect. It makes human striving ultimately meaningless.

But how would the Buddhists know that Nirvana is where we're heading? Where's the Buddhist who's been there and back? The Buddha himself? He never claimed such a thing as far as I can tell. And Buddhist scholars believe that a good percentage of the Buddha's recorded sayings were apparently invented over the centuries by devout monks who did not hesitate to ascribe their own words to the Great One himself. Even if Nirvana is a genuine representation of Buddha's beliefs about the afterlife, why is his version of post-mortem existence is so different from that of Jesus? Or from Mohammed? Until someone can come back from that good old bourne with some kind of evidence about what we're in store for after death (and come back with something more than a digital photograph, please!), my reason tells me that no living human being will ever know what happens after death. Anyone who persuades himself that he has the final truth about the invisible is laboring under a world-class self-delusion. Confirmed atheists, by the way, are not exempt from this kind of folly. Those secular humanists who blandly assure you that nothing happens after death are indulging in as much guesswork as any True Believer you care to name. Atheists don't know for certain what happens after death, any more than Christians or Moslems.

Having said all this, you are probably wondering how I can consider myself a spiritual person, since I am so skeptical about organized religion. Is this where my spiritually liberating broomstick has delivered me? Straight into the arms of nihilism? On the contrary, my broom has enabled me to experience what I think is a truly genuine spirituality. You must understand that I'm as human as everyone else. I don't want my consciousness to be annihilated when my physical body expires. But I'm too skeptical to take anything as a given. There are too many religions with too many different versions of the afterlife for me to be convinced that any one version is correct. I also need to emphasize one other important point here, namely that the most treasured tenets of all organized religions have not been invented by any kind of prophet, but by fallible human beings. That's the problem with organized belief systems. Followers happen to be fallible, and the organized religions that they create are equally fallible. Perhaps a case could be made that the founder of every major religion is always a special kind of human being who is not prone to the kind of mistakes the rest of us slobs are always making. But only a certifiable idiot would claim that a founder's most devoted followers are similarly mistake-proof. Throughout history these followers have proven time and time again that they are much more imperfect than the rest of us. They can be the most blinded of human beings, the most in thrall to turmoil, irrationalism, and a desperate desire to make their particular belief system prevail at any cost. One of my favorite True Believer quotes comes from Dietrich von Nieheim, Bishop of Verden, who stated in the De Schismate Libri III (1411):

When the existence of the Church is threatened, she is released from the commandments of morality. With unity as the end, the use of every means is sanctified, even cunning, treachery, violence, simony, prison, death. For all order is for the sake of the community, and the individual must be sacrificed to the common good.[7]

These kinds of sentiments are still a part of the mental landscapes of good True Believers today. And why not? Once you convince yourself that your religion is giving you special access to the Divine, you acquire an ego of monstrous proportions. It is these kinds of gargantuan egos who have put together every major religious system on planet earth. I'm talking about the kind of hysterical control freaks who are perfectly capable of behaving foolishly, criminally, corruptly, or even insanely in order to make certain that their belief system survives. Any human horror is always justified in the minds of these people, just as long as it keeps the faithful coming back for more. Show me an ego convinced of his or her spiritual superiority, and, my dear Janet, I'll show you a human nightmare.

This is especially true of those human nightmares who never manage to shake off the belief system into which they were indoctrinated when they were children. Most of us like to think that we are masters of our minds, but this never happens with the kind of True Believers who still adhere to the religion that was shoved down their throats when they were kids. There is no way these people can ever stand back from their childhood indoctrination and regard it with a disinterested perspective. We don't like to think that we were brainwashed when we were children, but that's what organized religions of any stripe do to their young, namely making sure that the kiddies know there is only one way to get their ticket to eternity. Only the most courageous and determined can walk away from something like that. Most people can't. True Believers don't even try. They remain enslaved to what they were taught as children, and even as adults anything that conflicts with their childhood picture is ignored. They see only what they've always seen and hear only what they've always heard.

But consider also the phenomenon of the convert. There actually are some people in this world who manage to break free of the religion in which they were raised, but the last thing you would call these people is liberated. A grown adult who cannot escape from childhood indoctrination is bad enough, but the kind of human being who leaves one totalitarian belief system for another is infinitely worse. People who change their religions invariably go through a lot of psychic stress. It takes a monumental intellectual and emotional effort to reject what you were taught in childhood; indeed, this can be one of the most difficult struggles a human being can go through in his or her life. As a result, converts inevitably relax when they find themselves in a new belief system. Things are settled at last. There is nowhere left to go. And there is no need to treat the new religion with any kind of skepticism since it was the old one that possessed the problems. The new one is the one that's perfect, the one which reveals the truth about the universe, and the one that has to be supported at all costs. All of which means that if you want to define the ultimate brain dead idiots of the universe, you simply need to utter the word convert.

Here in America people change their religion almost as frequently as they change their residences. You probably know as many True Believing converts as I do myself. Unfortunately, one can only analyze the convert in terms of that great American phenomenon known as Snake Oil. Nowadays we sophisticated post-moderns are enormously proud of the fact that we never purchase Snake Oil. It was only our idiot great-grandparents, way back in the 19^th century or whenever, who were dumb enough to shell out their hard-earned cash to purchase that most famous of con-job medications, guaranteed to cure you of everything, up to and including lumbago, misery, piles, shingles, female problems, you name it. Young man, step right up, I can absolutely guarantee no ifs ands or buts that this is the greatest Snake Oil made in the world today, brewed with the finest snakes money can buy—young snakes, vibrant snakes, snakes with a gleam in their eyes and a wiggle in their tails, true-blue, red-blooded American snakes. Yes, one silver dollar, and it will all be yours . . . Yeah, talk about suckers. Thank goodness we aren't dumb enough to fall for that kind of stuff these days. Or are we? Here at the millennium, when you take a close look at the various American spiritual rackets and the shyster honchos who are running them, all you still see are Great American Spiritual Snake Oil Salesmen and their millions of convert suckers. Young man, step right up, I can absolutely guarantee no ifs ands or buts that I'm going to cure what ails you, show you the Divine, generate spiritual bliss, solve your problems, get you off the booze, and provide you with your ticket to that true-blue, red-blooded forever eternity. And yes, I accept both Master Card and Visa . . .

I have often wondered how reasonably sane and intelligent people can turn into completely brain-dead spiritual suckers. I recently read an article about a battle-scarred veteran of a West Coast spiritual community. The poor sap had lived in an ashram for several months, during which time he was taken for a ride—financially, personally, and spiritually. He was now trying to figure out how he could have been such a sap. The answer was easy: the minute he became a convert he turned brain dead. And he moved into an environment where he was surrounded by other brain dead idiots who were as gullible as he was. In such an environment the ecstasy must have kept bubbling over like Alka-Seltzer. Not surprisingly, hardly anybody could just walk away.

What converts forget is that whenever any belief system gets organized, there is inevitably trouble. Spiritual truth no longer matters as much as the ceremonies, the administrators, the control of the information, and (this is the zinger) who's got the money. Time and time again history has demonstrated that religious organizations have an ingrained tendency for corruption. No organized religious system at any point in human history has been exempt from this. It happened in the 19^th century with all those new-fangled religious movements like Christian Science and Theosophy, it happened in the 20^th century with Krishnamurti's organization, and it's happening today. It will always happen whenever people throw out their logic and their skepticism for a chimera known as belief. This is otherwise known as selling your soul. Not selling your soul to the Devil, assuming that the Devil actually exists, but selling your soul to another human being, specifically the kind who claims he has special access to the Divine. Even today, in our allegedly secular world, it is happening as frequently as at any other period in history. If you don't believe me, take a look around you. What you will see are millions of people freely giving away their power and destiny every day of their lives. They don't necessarily sell their souls to politicians, or to your average Hollywood bimbo, or to the folks next door, but you can always find people who are willing to surrender their body, mind, and spirit, to another human being who claims to possess some kind of superior spirituality.

Several years ago when reading The Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce, I came across the following delectable definition of infidel:

INFIDEL, n. In NY, one who does not believe in the Christian religion; in Constantinople, one who does. (See GIAOUR.) A kind of scoundrel imperfectly reverent of, and niggardly contributory to, divines, ecclesiastics, popes, parsons, canons, monks, mollahs, voodoos, presbyters, hierophants, prelates, obeah-men, abbes, nuns, missionaries, exhorters, deacons, friars, hadjis, high-priests, muezzins, brahmins, medicine-men, confessors, eminences, elders, primates, prebendaries, pilgrims, prophets, imaums, beneficiaries, clerks, vicars-choral, archbishops, bishops, abbots, priors, preachers, padres, abbotesses, caloyers, palmers, curates, patriarchs, bonezs, santons, beadsmen, canonesses, residentiaries, diocesans, deans, subdeans, rural deans, abdals, charm-sellers, archdeacons, hierarchs, class-leaders, incumbents, capitulars, sheiks, talapoins, postulants, scribes, gooroos, precentors, beadles, fakeers, sextons, reverences, revivalists, cenobites, perpetual curates, chaplains, mudjoes, readers, novices, vicars, pastors, rabbis, ulemas, lamas, sacristans, vergers, dervises, lectors, church wardens, cardinals, prioresses, suffragans, acolytes, rectors, cures, sophis, mutifs and pumpums.[8]

Now this is one of the most delightful lists ever created. Any list which ends with the term "pumpum" is a list for the ages. And certainly the word pumpum, once heard, can never be forgotten. So what is a pumpum? Where in the world can you find such a creature? Why, absolutely everywhere! What we have here is a list of the various kinds of spiritual superiors whose job it is, for the right fee, to get you to the Divine. How lengthy a list it is! How many different kinds of titles are involved! How universal is the need for some sort of professional honcho who will not only going to tell you the truth about the universe but get your souls into eternal bliss—and all 100000% guaranteed, assuming that your check doesn't bounce. After all, you can't get into eternity by yourself! You need guidance! You need a priest or shaman or minister or guru, someone who supposedly has more knowledge and experience about spiritual matters than you do, to show you the way. Throughout human history, nothing is certain but death, taxes, and the universal human delusion that somebody else is needed to get you to the Divine. Even Dante had to be guided by two somebody elses (Virgil and Beatrice) in order to reach the big enchilada in the sky. If a genius like Dante couldn't manage it by himself, what hope can us lesser mortals have? The Protestant Reformation originated with the idea that no mediator was necessary between a human being and the Divine, but that notion didn't last very long. The idea that someone or something besides yourself is needed to connect you with the Universal Big Shot is still very much with us today.

The problem here is that whenever you rely upon another human being for your own spirituality, you make yourself vulnerable, and most especially if you're a convert. You will give away your common sense and your reason, not to mention the integrity of both your mind and your soul. You will also turn yourself into an imitator, and imitation, as Ralph Waldo Emerson says, is suicide.[9] You will reject your own truth, your own vision, and your own personal experience in order to pattern your life on the behavior of a human being who is quite possibly a worthless crud. Well, not all religious leaders are cruds, but if you're a convert it won't be easy for you to tell the cruds from the saints. You will be prime material to be manipulated, conned, swindled, and exploited.

There is a belief in Eastern cultures which goes like this: when the student is ready, the teacher appears. A handy phrase that seems to make sense—but does it? I used to believe it when I was trying to be a countercultural type, but nowadays it rings utterly false. Teachers, mediators, priests, gurus, pumpums of any kind . . . you need to forget them all if you want to find spiritual liberation. When you seek the Divine through another human being, you will never find it. It is true that you can learn things from other people, you can read the sages or study the works of great poets or artists, but you'd better watch out if you think you need a face-to-face meeting with somebody claiming to be your spiritual superior. Any kind of interaction between a seeker and a spiritual honcho is a recipe for disaster. There is no true freedom, no meeting of minds, no mutually illuminating exchange between a master and a disciple, or between a teacher and a pupil. Whenever you turn yourself into a follower of anyone or anything, you destroy yourself. And you don't just destroy yourself, you also destroy the person you are following. There is nothing like brain-dead admiration to engender the kind of monster ego that the pumpums of this world are forever demonstrating. In a master-disciple relationship, the disciple destroys the master, and the master destroys the disciple.

When will this silly old world rid itself of its spiritual bosses? Alas, there's no sign of it at the moment, not in any religious tradition East or West. Throughout human history, spiritual tyranny has always been the rule and not the exception, with pumpum oppression the name of the game. This was true especially throughout the Middle East where monotheistic religions first developed. It is believed, for example, that ancient Egyptian priests knew perfectly well that a solar year lasted 365¼ days. This knowledge enabled them to pinpoint the exact date of the annual flood. But they deliberately withheld the knowledge from the peasants who were told that the flooding wouldn't happen without annual priestly ceremonies—ceremonies for which they had to pay, of course. No wonder that nothing changed during 3,000 years of Egyptian history, and that it was a culture where the lives of ordinary people were endlessly and forever wretched. It was not until Athenian Greeks began to ask elementary questions about the nature of existence that a group of human beings managed to break free from priestly tyranny. They were blessed with independent minds that kept asking "why?", and we revere them as the first free thinkers in human history.

Unfortunately the Greek reliance on reason vanished with the triumph of Christianity and its fanatical adherents. The first Christian pumpums built a church which evolved into one of the most dictatorial institutions in human history. Throughout the long, dark centuries of Catholic oppression, you were never permitted to discover spiritual truth through your own efforts; you had to toe the official line or else you ended up in a hellish little mess. This spiritual despotism quite naturally went hand in hand with political tyranny and served up a clever notion that kept millions in their place for centuries, namely the Divine Right of Kings. Urging the people to bow down before the powers that be has always been the Christian way. Examples include Russian Orthodox priests who for generations preached subservience to the Romanov autocracy, ante-bellum Southern preachers who constantly assured their lily-white audiences people that African slavery was divinely inspired, and German pastors who sang the praises of the Fuehrer. If you know nothing of the lies, manipulations, and criminal activities of religious pumpums in all human cultures, you know nothing of history—or of human gullibility. There is no tyranny like spiritual tyranny.

We Americans are always surprised whenever a prominent religious leader—whether minister, priest, guru, swami, or bishop—proves to be just another sleaze. Why can't we understand that this is only to be expected? Religious big shots are in power positions, and people in power positions face constant temptation. History shows us that pumpums in all cultures have given in to temptation as frequently as royal courtiers, Marxist commissars, and American politicians. Mind you, religious corruption tends to happen not for personal reasons, but for the greater glory of the faith. Religious zealots are frequently capable of doing anything, and I do mean anything, to perpetuate their belief system of choice, up to and including dishonesty, bribery, flattery of the converts, groveling before secular authorities, putting down challenges with ferocious viciousness, inciting armed conflict, and maintaining close control of the swinish herd who cannot be permitted to think for themselves—and it's only for their own good! There is no power like spiritual power. It's the people's ticket to eternity, remember. British philosopher Lord Acton memorably remarked that power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.[10] He should have added that spiritual power corrupts beyond any kind of absolute that has been known on this earth.

Spiritual con artists have been endemic in American history since the middle of the 19^th century, when all sorts of thoroughly crackpot religious figures made their appearance. I would include here Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormon Church, who managed to persuade people he had received the word of God from the Angel Moroni (love that name). God's words were inscribed genuine golden tablets, which have since disappeared, but no matter since they were transcribed into The Book of Mormon. Mormon converts were certain that this book was truly the Word of God since its language wasn't 19^th century hick farm talk but authentic Ye Olde Englishe, or at least a reasonable facsimile thereof, that sounded almost exactly like Shakespeare or the King James Bible, and everybody knows this is the way God really talks. The fact that the prose of The Book of Mormon is as relentlessly turgid as it gets (Mark Twain described it as "chloroform in print")[11] doesn't seem to matter to the thousands who converted to Mormonism in the 19^th century, or the millions who call themselves Mormons today.

Then there was Mary Baker Eddy, a chronic invalid who learned early in life how to use her bad health to manipulate everyone around her. As an adult, however, she discovered that the real clout lay in instigating miracle cures. Pretty soon she was curing everybody (isn't the placebo effect wonderful?), and the money started pouring in. She called her movement Christian Science, science being a 19^th century buzzword for all that was progressive, modern, and enlightened. Nowadays she would call it Cyber Christianity, and converts would still be lining up. Eddy also wrote a scripture of sorts, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, full of even more Ye Olde Englishe than anything you can find in Smith. This book makes interesting, if incoherent reading—nobody minded that Eddy could not sustain a logical argument and simply jumps from one idea to another without any kind of rhyme or reason. Eddy is most famous for the presence of a telephone at her funeral in 1910, through which the faithful believed that her spirit was able to communicate. However, what she chatted about on the phone at her funeral was unfortunately not recorded. Now Janet, what does this tell you about the rational thinking of Eddy's "faithful"?

The nineteenth century also saw the birth of Spiritualism (its adherents knew that dead spirits were hanging around since they kept knocking on the tables), and Theosophy, a concoction of Eastern and Western beliefs put together by one Helena Blavatsky, as preposterous a money-grubbing shyster as has ever walked the planet. Her magnum opus, Isis Unveiled, is probably the ultimate in spiritual con-artist gobbledygook and so pretentious and unreadable that it may as well have been written by a tenured academic. Over the years there have been plenty of suckers who have persuaded themselves that there must be something in this interminable 800-page folderol, especially since Blavatsky was clever enough to announce that she had Tibetan spooks talking to her. That's right—she was getting the word from some authentic dead Tibetans. The dear lady wasn't dumb enough to mess around with Bulgarian spooks or Swedish spooks or (how pedestrian) American spooks—she had hooked up with genuine Tibetans, and everybody knows Tibetans are really in the know, even if they don't speak Ye Olde Englishe. The Blavatsky blather worked—the money continued to pour in even after it was revealed that her principle shine in India had a sliding panel through which her assistants were pushing the spook messages. The only thing interesting about Blavatsky is why weren't people laughing? Why aren't they laughing now? Theosophy is still going strong these days.

In the 20^th century, especially during or after the Sixties, came a new flood of Snake Oil Pumpums, including Oscar Ichazo, who founded Arica, L. Ron Hubbard, founder of Scientology, and Jim Jones, the famous "Dad" who led his hundreds of followers off to a South American jungle and ordered them one beautiful morning in 1978 to commit suicide en masse—anything you say, Dad, you're the boss. Then there were the imported Indian gurus. Virtually ever single one of them who came to these shores in those days eventually turned out to be some kind of fraud. One of the most memorable was the seventeen-year old, two hundred pound Guru Maharaj Ji, Perfect Master of the Divine Light Mission (on TV you could watch people prostrating themselves before this fatso as he sat upon his golden throne). There were also the Hare Krishnas, whose members were promised eternal bliss but whose children eventually pursued a class action lawsuit against the organization for horrendous child abuse. Finally, there was the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, who owned ninety-three Rolls Royces and whose most famous truth was that sex was the way to enlightenment—middle-class Americans loved this one. Several years after he established an ashram in Oregon it was raided by the Feds, who discovered assault rifles, semi-automatic carbines, riot guns, and other assorted weapons hidden about the premises, plus evidence of wire tapping and attempted poisonings. The Bhagwan was thereupon deported, after which he immediately changed his name to Osho and started collecting hundreds of new followers (who says there are no second acts in American life?). The most widely admired Sixties guru was Swami Rama of the Himalayan Institute, who could stop the beating of his heart upon command, a feat that convinced thousands he was a force to be reckoned with. However, in the early 1980s credible information surfaced that he was taking sexual advantage of his more susceptible female devotees.

One thing you will notice about these pumpums is that they always give some kind of ostentatious appellation to the movement that they are initiating. Who in the world would be interested in practicing the Joseph Smith Religion or the L. Ron Hubbard Religion? No, better call it Mormonism or Scientology or Something Else That Sounds Portentous. Even Americans aren't suckers enough to follow what is only the personal spiritual belief of a single human being. The new religion always needs a name to show that it is a movement, with lots of acolytes dutifully revering the pumpum in charge. So a multi-syllabled title is an absolute necessity, and needless to say, it works beautifully.

Here at dawn of the 21^st century, you can find corrupt spiritual leaders in whatever spiritual path you care to name: fundamentalist Christianity, the Roman Catholic Church, and the New Age movement. I would like to think that the New Age movement might be exempt from all the chicanery, but something happens to exist in the New Age movement which exists in all spiritual movements, namely the bottom line. Business is business even in the world of alternative spirituality. Show me a New Age leader whose income depends solely upon paying customers, and I'll show you a human being who will inevitably make compromises. All those nagging worries about unpaid bills or retirement security inevitably means that most New Age pumpums will give their customers not what they need but what they want. Anything to keep the meal tickets coming back for more. And come back they do, time and time again. Let us not forget that what's so attractive about the New Age is its ability to promise instant and immediate spiritual gratification. Nobody has to practice discipline or spend years of study in the New Age world—you can get your spiritual bliss right this minute without any effort at all! In the world of the New Age everything is always sweetness and light, just as long as the dollar bills keep piling up.

In the English town of Sheffield in the year 1587, in the glorious days of Bloody Mary, one pregnant woman who had been sentenced to be burned alive gave birth while the fires were being lit. Someone grabbed the baby and pulled it out of the flames. One of the pumpums in charge immediately seized the baby and threw it back into the fire, where it perished along with its mother. Yet another magnificent moment in the history of organized religion. These moments are still with us: in February, 2002 Muslim fundamentalists burned several dozen people alive in Godhra, Gujarat, including twenty children.[12] Their crime? They had the wrong religion. The good Muslims who performed this cleansing act knew perfectly well that the act was necessary to insure the survival of the true faith. If you had dared to argue with them, they would have started babbling about Hindu atrocities.

At any rate, I'm getting a headache. I don't like to think about organized religion and its various spiritual imprisonments. Spiritual liberation is the only thing that counts, remember. I'll have to continue with this some other time.

Mona

* * *

January 20

Janet—yes, you're right. I need correction. I can't claim that every single human being who adheres to an organized religion is venal or corrupt. You can find a lot of perfectly decent people who are well suited to their religion, and they go through their lives practicing the highest values that their belief system instills into them. At its best, organized religion can provide its believers with decent ethical standards, a feeling of being at home, and a link to past generations. There's nothing wrong with that, if and when it works. I am also willing to admit that there have been honest and hardworking religious leaders throughout history. We can always find spiritual leaders whose integrity is beyond question, even in the biggest religious organizations. The role that the Roman Catholic Church in Poland played in resisting Soviet tyranny the 1980s is a classic example of the good that a religious organization can do. But when your average religious honcho gets big, gets famous, gets clout, and gets money, corruption can set in. It also sets in when the faith is perceived as being under attack, or not growing fast enough, or losing its membership, or . . . well, there are a million different reasons why pumpums turn corrupt.

The heck with pumpums. I don't like the idea that you need another human being to show you the way to the Divine. And me being the eternal skeptic, I tend to think that the most profound spiritual development only happens when you are able to think things through for yourself. This is what the great mystics have always done. I'm hugely skeptical about pumpums, but mystics I like. For most of my adult life, I have studied the writings of mystics from both East and West, and I have always been impressed. The greatest mystics go beyond formal religion to a place where it is just Me and the Divine. This is probably the reason why so many of them are always getting prosecuted—they can see religious organizations for the imprisonments they are. Janet, as an artist you need to remember that sooner or later, all human institutions get in the way of genuine life, whether spiritual or creative.

You also need to remember that the greatest artists and poets have always followed their own inner truth. I have long felt that the most brilliant artistic achievements are always spiritual, and this is, quite simply, what makes it great. Those pedestrian academics who think that art should be secular are in denial about the true nature of human genius. They are also just plain dumb. Whenever a supreme artistic genius is able to render a vision of the universe that is coherent, vivid, and disciplined, something spiritual is being communicated. It can be communicated through a single picture or the smallest lyric poem. This is what is worth getting from another human being—not what they can teach you, nor how they interpret their religious dogma, but their own personal revelation. This is true not only for the visual arts but for music, poetry, architecture, pottery, quilts, anything created by human beings, anything that reorders reality. I am reminded of the man who went to hear Beethoven's Fifth Symphony for the first time and later said that he could not find his head. The music had zapped him on some kind of spiritual level as it does to everyone, although it is an exercise in futility to explain in words what the music does to you. But whenever you encounter a great work of art, something can happen to knock you out of space and time, aches and pains, memories and worries, and into the realm of the spirit. This happens in a play like Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, with its shimmering, redemptive vision, in Vincent van Gogh's paintings, in Emily Brontë's poetry. Any human being who is able to communicate his or her own individual vision of the universe can show us new ways of thinking, seeing, and feeling that inevitably enriches our own perceptions of reality. Art for art's sake is nice, but the greatest art always has one effect only, namely that of spiritual regeneration.

The operative word here is regeneration. There is nothing we humans need more than a sense of newness occasionally coming into our humdrum lives. If we cannot find a way to loosen the chains of habit and move into new space or freedom, we will never be able to see the world as it truly is, a miraculous regenerative wonder. A sense of newness can be as liberating as flying the skies on a moonless summer night. It also adds up to another of my crackpot ideas about living a life of virtue. Virtue can be found not only in making or in manual labor, but in regeneration, when you are able to bring new ideas or form into your existence. If you want to live your life to the fullest, you constantly need to find ways to develop, change, or reinvent yourself. That guy in the ashram who had to bow down before a pumpum to get a daily dose of bliss . . . why couldn't he have started responding to Toulouse-Lautrec or Brahms? Or pay attention to the glories of the natural world around him: wind or stars or the beauty of stones? Didn't he realize how easy it is to generate ecstasy in his life? If only by looking at clouds? Janet, have you ever thought about the miracle of clouds? I have been enamored of clouds since I was a kid; I can watch them for minutes at a time. I especially adore black storm clouds with their portents for energy and change. A storm cloud against a luminous sky is one of the greatest wonders we can experience. I suppose there are some idiots in this world who think that if you've seen one cloud you've seen'em all, but this is pathetic nonsense. There is an art to watching clouds. You have to learn how to do it right. Fortunately once you acquire the knack, you will discover that you cannot ever be bored or depressed at any moment in your life. There is always too much fascinating drama going on in the sky above you. 

The main thing clouds are always telling us, of course, is that we need to ascend into the sky with them. Going through life as a cloud watcher is okay, I guess, but one thing I've learned in recent years is that this is nothing compared to the ecstatic joy of being a cloud penetrator, specifically a spiritually liberated witch-upon-flying-broomstick kind of penetrator, the kind of human who knows how to zap straight into that ethereal mistiness. I suppose aircraft pilots might be familiar with this glorious sensation, but you can't ever experience an ultimate communion with a cloud until you manage to dart into one on a broomstick. This is absolutely the ultimate in elemental bliss.

Mona

P.S. Janet, in answer to your question, no, I haven't been flying lately. This is one of the worst winters I can remember, and going upwards in the middle of a prairie winter is too brainless even for me. Takeoffs and landings on that idiot broomstick are tough enough without having your bare feet turn into blue popsicles. I can wait for the warmer weather. In the meantime I'm reading my gardening catalogs. And still getting nightmares about dirigibles, alas!

* * *

January 25

Dirigibles? You want to know why am I scared of dirigibles? Have I forgotten to mention this horrid problem? Janet, you had better be aware that there are certain problems involved in flying on a broomstick. Not that accidentally falling off the broom is one of them, since I've learned that you cannot fall off a witch's broom. But when I first started to fly, I discovered that the source of my greatest angst was the problem of dirigibles.

Dirigibles have got to be the ultimate broomstick horror. A dirigible is this enormous bloated something which floats like a huge balloon. Fortunately there haven't been too many of them since the Hindenburg went belly up back in the 1930s, but they are still around these days, and without question they represent the greatest danger to a flying witch. After all, there's not a whole lot you can collide with in the sky when you're on your broomstick. Birds tends to veer off whenever you approach them, and you are flying too slowly and usually too low to collide with an aircraft. Dirigibles are a different matter. When I first started to fly, I realized that I might collide with one of those blimp things without any warning. Whenever you dart into a cloud, how do you know what you might find inside it? You don't know, of course. Therein lies the problem. I'm sure that dirigibles are all over the place these days—you can't have a Super Bowl without one. It seems like they are just hanging there in the Illinois sky, waiting for me to slam into them. I try not to think about them, but sometimes I can't help it. Just one dirigible in the wrong place in the prairie sky, and that would be the end of everything.

Well, enough about blimps. I need to get back to the broom, don't I? That's the whole point of these e-mails, remember: the construction, maintenance and use of a flying broomstick. I've covered the necessity of making the broom in the most virtuous manner possible, and I've covered both levity and the horrors of organized spirituality. So what's next? Simple. My next revelatory insight is that you've got to grow your flying broom. Yes, you heard me right. The darn thing has to be grown. Your broom is not going to fly unless you know how to put a seed into the earth and get it to grow. Now, don't worry—this is easier than it sounds.

I have already mentioned my love of gardening, which is only to be expected of a wise woman. Real witchcraft has always been based on one thing only, namely skill with plants. Over the centuries wise men and women have known how to use plants for an infinite number of human problems. When I created my garden several years ago, I was determined that it was going to be an authentic witch's garden, and I ended up growing more than fifty different herbs and flowers, which I've cultivated more for their scent and their medicinal qualities than their color. My garden is filled with old-fashioned cabbage roses, therapeutic herbs, flowering trees and bushes, and heirloom vegetables. I've also got a moon garden filled with white and ivory flowers. Maybe I never managed to build myself a cabin in the wilderness, but at least I am smart enough to grow a lot of my own food. A garden can help you see what truly matters in life, namely life itself in all its rich and radiant manifestations. Spend time nurturing your own plot of earth, and you will discover that it works wonders in your soul. It will also help you understand the miracle of what is most ordinary. You cannot live the good life without planting, weeding, and harvesting a garden.

Most of my plants thrive under my care and give every indication of being perfectly contented. I've always had a feeling that my plants want to help me as much as they can. One day when I was pondering the broomstick conundrum, it occurred to me that I should forget about searching historical records for the secret to upwardness and simply ask one of my plants for the answer. That's right—I'm talking about initiating a conversation with an herb and getting it to respond to me. Believe it or not, at the time this idea seemed to make sense. I figured that as long as I put the question to the right kind of plant, one with demonstrable magical powers, I might get the answer that I needed. Perhaps this was how medieval wise women had solved their upwardness problem: they simply asked their plants what they needed to do in order to fly. And then who knows? Perhaps the rosemary or the basil might have obliged them with the correct response.

Now quit laughing and think about this for a minute. What I'm talking about is the idea of channeling, which is a popular contemporary trend. Channeling is the ability to hear words from some kind of disembodied spirit. In recent years a plethora of channeled books have been published, all of which have been written, so it is claimed, not by something as lowly a human being but by . . . well, I've never figured out exactly what. Incorporeal spirits, or something like that. Most of these spirits seem to be humanoid, but sometimes a particularly lucky channeler will get a river or a tree or even the earth itself to start talking. These spirits talk in English, too, although presumably French rivers speak French, and German ones speak German. Now as I've already mentioned, I don't like the idea of going to another human being for spiritual assistance. However, I started to wonder if I could get the information I needed from some kind of disembodied spirit. This seemed like something that might work. If so many people these days were getting messages from disembodied spirits, why couldn't I manage it, too? I simply had to find myself a nature spirit who was willing to spill the beans, so to speak, and then up I would inevitably go.

So I started reading all sorts of channeled books, not necessarily for information they conveyed but to figure out how to get a nature spirit to open its darn mouth and start talking to me. But the more I read, the more frustrated I grew. It became increasingly obvious that what had been recorded in these books was the height of bird-brained banality. One would imagine that that if some kind of non-human entity decided to start talking, it might have something interesting to say, and say it with wit, verve, or cleverness. That wasn't happening with these wearisome sprits. The channeled books I was reading were filled with one belabored sentence after another, a good number of which never quite made it to that thing called a point. At least none of disembodied entities were speaking in Ye Olde Englishe, which must be passé among entities these days. One must be grateful for small mercies, but the problem remained—I could not find anything valuable about how to get a nature spirit to start talking to me.

But I had a witch's garden, didn't I? Why couldn't I figure out on my own how to get one of my plants to start talking? Preferably one with distinctly aerial tendencies. If I got the right kind of herb to utter the necessary words, my upwardness problem might be easily solved. So I started to spend my evenings sitting in the garden, waiting for one of the plants to open its mouth and start yammering. I tried to keep my mind as meditatively quiet as possible and my whole being open. I did allow myself to swat the occasional mosquito, but apart from that I was pure receptiveness. This seemed to be the most practical way to go about it, and I was certain that I would eventually get what I needed.

Well, guess what. Evening after evening passed away in nothing but unhelpful silence. Eventually I decided that I needed to try a different tactic. Maybe instead of waiting for the plants to start speaking, I should initiate the conversation myself. So I started sitting down next to certain plants and talking to them. I complemented them on their growth and vigor, and then I asked them if there was anything in particular that they needed from me, softening them up first so to speak. Then, at an appropriate moment, I told them exactly what I was after, namely the secret to upwardness. Vervain, darling, you've been recognized as a magical herb since the beginning of time. Would it be asking too much for you to tell me how to get off the ground on a flying broom? Thanks ever so.

Moron Mona strikes again. Did any of my plants answer me back? The only sound I ever heard was the noise of the good old internal combustion engine coming from the Interstate, and one thing for sure about internal combustion engines—they aren't about to reveal any upwardness secrets. My plants never responded with anything except silence. After a few weeks of this frustrating nonsense, I would have been satisfied if one of the petunias had started telling light bulb jokes, but I couldn't even manage that. The plants just sat there in the soil as they had always done, speechless. But oddly enough, the experiment didn't prove to be a complete failure. I started to become aware of things that I had never noticed about my garden. The first and most important revelation was that the plants in my garden did possess some kind of consciousness. I realized that every single one of them was an alert entity who was distinctly aware of what was going on in the world. And I do mean aware: on some level the plants were as conscious of their environment as I was myself. This was something that I had always suspected but had never truly sensed. But consciousness in a plant is not that surprising if you remember that sub-atomic particles are always acting like they are living beings, much to the irritation of physicists. If quarks can behave as if they're alive and kicking, why not cabbages?

I have read that all plants, whether cabbages or petunias, do possess some kind of primitive yet communicable intelligence. They can respond to affection, suffer pain, react to music, feel gratitude for favors, recognize friends, explore their environments, possess memory, and experience emotion, including alarm at the thought of being torn or uprooted. They even possess distinct personalities. The gardening phenomenon known as companion planting is well known. Some plants will thrive when planted next to a congenial partner, but they quickly wither if grown near a plant which is antagonistic. Modern science would explain that the plants are reacting chemically to their neighboring herbs, but if you ask me these plants are exhibiting a distinctly conscious awareness. The more you know about plants, the weirder it gets. There are more things in garden and earth than are dreamt of in most people's philosophy.

Feeling love for a plant seems to be an instinctive human emotion, and plants seem to feel as much love for us as we feel for them. Cynics might object that the human race has betrayed this love thousands of times over the centuries. We live in a world where rainforests are being destroyed, crops are drenched with herbicides, and homeowners never think twice about the pain they are causing their grass when they turn on the mower. If there was once true communion between humanity and plants, now there is only poison and exploitation. But in spite of the destruction, I am certain that there exists some kind of supernatural connection between humanity and plants. It has been noted that some varieties of plants can demonstrate visible responses to the emotional states of their owners. Sage is one of these plants. If things are going badly for you, the plant starts to wither. When things improve, so does the plant. If you don't believe me, get a sage plant for yourself and start watching it—you might be surprised. All of this means something spiritual to me. Plants are more than vegetation—they are spiritual entities. It's not only us human who have souls—so do plants. They could even be described as the living link between the physical and the spiritual. One reason why so many millions of people find pleasure in plants is their ability to project this sense of the sacred. It's not only great art or poetry which can convey spiritual meaning to you—our plants can do it as well.

Whenever I did talk to my plants, sometimes I could sense that they were radiating a discernable energy back to me. It was a kind of sentient response, I guess, and something that I could feel—it was as though invisible firecrackers were exploding in the air around them. So we were communicating, if only on an energetic level. It occurred to me that this was why wise women were so successful with their herbs. They worked to establish some kind of intuitive link with between their own consciousness and the consciousness of their plants. The difference between an herbalist and a witch is that an herbalist will cultivate her plants, but a witch will communicate with hers. So if you want the perfect garden, you don't just grow your plants—you need to enter into partnership with them. Both of you together will co-create the garden.

Janet, are you aware that some of the greatest botanists who have ever lived, men like George Washington Carver and Luther Burbank, were also convinced that plants possessed not only sentience, but an ability to evolve in the most beneficial way possible for the good of humanity? Burbank in particular felt that plants altered their traits to fit particular places and climates more quickly than genetics could explain. I find it fascinating that innumerable varieties of plants have evolved throughout the centuries right along with humanity; modern vegetables or fruits bear little or no resemblance to their ancestors in the wild. Many of these modern varieties are now unable to survive without human assistance. In particular, grains such as corn, rice, wheat, and rye are so dependent upon humanity that they are unable to propagate without human assistance. Today we think of cereal grains as nothing but complex, low-fat carbohydrates which don't clog up our arteries. However, our remote ancestors believed that grains were foods to be worshipped or even deified. In antiquity the planting, sowing, and harvesting of grain was a life and death matter, and all aspects of grain cultivation were accompanied by propitiatory rites. Even the cooking of grains was a sacred act. Some historians believe that it was only when people first began to plant and consume grains that humans began to develop a spiritual sense. This feels right to me. Even in our post-modern world, the idea of a loaf of bread or a rice bowl continues to have a certain spiritual resonance. This is especially true in Asian countries, where rice is still considered a sacred plant. Grains in some form are the basis of the eating habits of all traditional cultures. I have read that grains are the most balanced of foods, and that they most closely approximate the chemical structure of human beings. A diet based upon cereal grains is the ancient way of eating. It is what human bodies are designed to consume. When you eat grains, you are consuming the life spirit of the earth.

Rice was the sacred food in the east, wheat in the west, and corn in the Americas. Corn is the premier food plant in this part of the world, where it is more widely grown than any other American crop. To all Native Americans, corn is the sacred plant. It is the one plant which most successfully thrives in American soil, especially here in Illinois where there is so much earth energy. Right here, right now, corn is the single most important plant of my time and space. Which brings me, finally, to the point—corn is what you've got to grow for a flying broomstick. Specifically, broom corn. There, I've said it at last! Broom corn is what you need to get up into the air! If we're talking about a broomstick as a vehicle for spiritual liberation, you've got to use the Great American Spiritual Plant. What could make more sense? I am, after all, an American witch. If I want to fly, I have to create an American broom. I need to use my own particular sacred plant, the one that is most suitable to my time and space, for my broom, or else it will go exactly nowhere, let alone up. I have read that medieval European witches made their brooms out of the broom plant (Cytisus scoparius). But Cytisus is a tender perennial which doesn't grow too well in a cold continental climate. However, broom corn absolutely loves the Midwest. Illinois has the perfect soil and climate for it, or for any other variety of corn you might want to try.

It's not difficult finding broom corn seeds—they are frequently listed in gardening catalogs as a "novelty" item. Yes, they are so novel that you can make a flying broomstick out of them. Why levitation is never mentioned as a good selling point for these kinds of seeds I can't begin to imagine—you'd think seed companies would realize it's a fantastic way to market their product. Also broom corn is a variety which is very easy to grow—you plant the seeds in April, keep them watered and weeded, and by September you've got what you need: at the top of the stalk you will see these weird bristles erupting into the air, with new seeds forming at the end. I've always thought that those plants whose seed heads explode outwards in firecracker fashion, like dill and caraway, are plants which possess some kind of elementary affinity with air. That's what they want to interact with, instead of remaining comfortably close to the earth. Broom corn is like this. It is a plant which wants to elevate itself (lev!) as far as possible into the atmosphere.

So broom corn is what you need to grow if you want to fly. But obviously this is not the whole answer. Bristles alone do not an entire broom make. You also need a staff. And that is another story.

Upwards forever,

Mona

* * *

February 2

Yes, of course you can plant some broom corn in my back yard when you come back to Carver next year. I have lots of space, and my favorite niece is more than welcome to cultivate her own tidy plot. But here I had better explain things further. If you intend to do something as wildly insane as flying on a broom, you must understand that ideas of tidiness and cultivation do not work as far as your broomstick shaft is concerned. Try harvesting your carefully cultivated broom corn and attach it to a carefully cultivated broomstick staff, and you will go exactly no where, let alone up. You will be making the kind of mistake Catherine Earnshaw made when she chose the civilized monotony of Thrushcross Grange over the raw elemental energy of Wuthering Heights, where Heathcliff awaits. Oh, Heathcliff, darling Heathcliff! I've never once had a date with a guy who even mildly resembled him, but I'm sure he would have been the perfect match for me. Heathcliff is the solution to the other part of a flying broomstick, in case you haven't already guessed. Not because he's the perfect Gothic hero, but because he's a rebel. A metaphysical rebel. You name it, and he's rebelling against it. Rebellion happens to matter in our lives. Prometheus is the only god that counts. Unless your broomstick is at least part-rebel, it's not going to move an inch.

Janet, I really had to expend considerable mental energy to figure this out. I was initially convinced that the broomstick staff was something I also needed to grow in my garden. And with my medieval-witches-knew-best mindset, I figured that I had to start researching what sort of trees would produce a staff that would get me into the air. A lot of folklore has survived about the allegedly "magical" properties of various trees. It is well known that the Druids were nuts about oaks; fairies were reputed to hide out in elder stalks; ash was almost universally regarded as the most arcane or mysterious of trees; and hazel wood (including witch hazel) was used for divining. You had to find yourself the right kind of magical tree, pay particular attention to the time and the manner in which you cut your branch (midsummer night was preferred), and then you got what you needed. But the more I pondered all this, the less sense it made. Granted I could find the right kind of tree, plant it in the corner of my backyard, wait several years until a suitable branch developed, and saw it off at the appropriate astrological moment. Then I would simply tie a bunch of dried broom corn to the staff, and up I would undoubtedly go. Or would I? I realized that I would be hacking off a perfectly good branch of a perfectly decent tree for my own selfish purposes. Would that get me into the air? The tree would most assuredly have more use of the branch than I would. Maybe I needed to ask the tree for permission to make a cut and wait until I received some sort of affirmative response. Well, my experience in trying to initiate a conversation with the petunias had left me somewhat skeptical about conversing with plants.

A flying broomstick is a freedom thing. A garden is a controlled space. As much as I adore my garden, I know that it has its limitations. I realized that if I tried to construct the whole broom out of cultivated plants, it wouldn't go anywhere, let alone into upwardness. Part of the broomstick needed to be a deliberately nurtured product of my life and consciousness, but the other part of it needed to be wild, unpredictable, and free. What I needed was a piece of rebel wood. A nonconforming stick. Were I not the lady that I am, I would even say that I needed a "shove it" sort of shaft. A Heathcliff type of wood.

Janet, you must understand that this is not my habitual scatterbrained lunacy. It dovetails with what I understand about quantum physics. Not that I will ever understand everything about quantum physics, but the subject does interest me, and on occasion I even try to figure it out, mainly because it sounds so incredibly insouciant. This is not a word which contemporary physicists would use to describe their dour research, but I think it fits. What does quantum physics tell us, anyway? Namely that the universe isn't some kind of machine, like Newton's idea of a gigantic clock. On the contrary, it's a . . . well, what? No one can say for sure, not even the most tedious Nobel Prize winning physicist. We live in a universe that is constantly astonishing. The more that is discovered about physical reality, the more incredible it seems. The discoveries which were made in the early part of the 20^th century: the principles of nonlocality, superstrings, black holes, self-organizing systems . . . they sound so fabulously irrational, even playful. Not to mention the new theories which are being tossed around today: chaos, fractals, the possibility of experimental mathematics. The role of chance in the current scientific worldview seems to be its distinctive characteristic. Until recently nobody ever suspected that something as messy and as unpredictable as chance could be the basic reality of our universe, but people are finally starting to accept this notion, and a good thing it is, too.

All of this is reassuring since it means one thing: openness. Nothing about our universe is engraved in granite. Free will exists everywhere. Most natural systems are chaotic or can become so under the right conditions. Something new is always being constantly generated, at all times, in all places. Nobody, not even the most gifted psychic, can predict the future with absolute certainty, since there is no such thing. There are only choices and energies we can work with in the here and now. People can make educated guesses about what's going to happen in their lives, but surprises will always keep occurring. By the way, one of my theories about human existence goes like this: if there are never any surprises in your life, your life isn't working. You need to tear down your mental structures, toss out your world view, and let some new oomph into your life. Only then will you be able to live at your fullest potential.

This brings me to a moment of serendipitous chance, which solved my broomstick staff problem. One morning when Ralph was taking me for his regular Saturday morning walk by the river, guess what appeared before my eyes? A fantastic piece of driftwood about six feet long, its bark and branches long gone. It had been caught in a tangle near the bank of the river. I pulled it out of the mud and stared at it with amazement. It had been in the water for so long that it looked as though it had been purified by the elements of earth, air, fire, and water. Ralph immediately gave the stick a nasal investigation, and I waited to see how he would react. I have learned to respect Ralph's opinion in all matters since he is so vastly superior—morally, intellectually, and spiritually—to any guy I have ever been involved with. To my relief Ralph gave every indication that he liked what he smelled. I waited to see if there was any chance he might urinate on the branch, but he refrained. I knew at once that I had found my broomstick staff. I was holding Heathcliff in my hands.

So I ended up with a broomstick that was a perfect balance between the classic and the romantic. A cultured plant for the bristles, plus a wild branch for the staff. Apollo and Dionysus. Nature tamed and untamed. A natural product nurtured by human effort, and a piece of wood which had never been touched by a living being. The wisdom and the order of the garden; the unpredictability and the vitality of the wilderness. Both of which makes for the ideal broomstick. Both are necessary aspects of a balanced human consciousness, and both are necessary to a flying broom. Put them together, and they spell Bladud.

By the way, have I mentioned that I named my flying broomstick Bladud? I must confess that I adore the coming together of those two particular syllables. Such intensity! Such grandiloquence! I couldn't resist.

Mona

P.S. I once had a date with a guy who told me that whenever he took a vacation he climbed into his car and started driving, not knowing where he would end up. Memphis or Denver or Muncie, he didn't care. I thought I had finally found a live one, even if he was a corporate vice president. But the only other things he wanted to talk about were his three story house, his car, his boat, his wine collection, his favorite TV shows, and his preferred stores at the mall. Where O where have all the cowboys gone?

* * *

February 9

Yes, the spectacle of the contemporary American male is pretty dismal. And you're not having much luck either? Janet, I'm not surprised. What you need to find is an interesting, independent, non-materialistic kind of guy. A guy who has somehow incorporated the Territory within him. Not the brutality of the savage wilderness, mind you, but at least an ability to embrace the unexpected, keep an open mind, and remain awake to new possibilities. A perfect post-modern rebel. Someone who can cry: damn the political correctness, full speed ahead! And where in the world can anyone find a guy like that in corporate America? Given the relentless conformity of contemporary American life, it's hard to remember that this country was started by rebels, men and women who were not just political but spiritual rebels as well. Nowadays, in an era when American politicians have to repeatedly proclaim a faith in the Christian God, we tend to forget that our 18th century Founding Fathers, all those long-haired, gun-toting insurgents, were as determined to free themselves from the Christian religion as much as from the British. They weren't Christians, not by a long shot. They were Deists.

I suspect that the word "Deist" sounds vaguely comforting to contemporary Christians, since it seems to mean that Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin were still reputable members of the predominate faith, even if they did exhibit some peculiar eccentricities. Nothing could be further from the truth. Good Diests that they were, our Founders rejected almost everything about Christianity. The Fathers were not unethical, irreligious, or immoral, but they did not believe that once upon a time, at a specific point in history, the Supreme Deity had started talking to a bunch of Middle Eastern camel drivers. Thomas Jefferson in particular had nothing but contempt for the various creeds, catechisms, theological speculations, and ecclesiastical institutions which had infected the earth for centuries. In his Notes on the State of Virginia he states that

Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned . . . What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites.[13]

If you ask me, our Founding Fathers were able to rebel politically because they had already rebelled mentally against the predominate religion, up to and including the whole conceptualization of God which was presented in biblical scripture. They could see that the deity presented in the Bible was just some kind of imaginative entity envisioned by a small group of human beings who lived four or five thousand years ago. Deists didn't even like to use the word God and instead used the term Almighty. Rid yourself of an ingrained conceptualization of the divine, and you can rid yourself of anything, up to and including nuisances like George III.

This brief historical reminder is highly germane to the issue of a flying broomstick, believe it or not, the whole point of which, remember, is spiritual liberation. So, my dear Janet, before we get back to the mechanics of broomstick upwardness, I'm afraid you're going to have to suffer through yet another digression, but one which is the most important so far. We need to discuss the dreary subject of divine concepts. And what do I mean by that? Simple. I am talking about the innumerable versions of God or Goddess or the Almighty or What Have You which have been invented by human beings since the beginning of time. That's what people have always done, you see, as long as they have walked upon the earth. Invent their deities. Either they invent a whole bunch of them, usually the members of a single divine family, or they dream up one ultimate Big Shot. But every last one of them is a distinct human imagining. Up to and including the God of the Old Testament, Jehovah himself.

Now I'm sure that your average True Believer will immediately throw a hissy fit at the above statement. Jehovah is the real God, he will insist. Maybe the other gods were dreamed up by a bunch of illiterate yokels, but not Jehovah! He's the one that's real! He's the genuine ruler of the universe! The Greeks and the Romans and maybe the Muslims invented their gods, but not the God in the Bible! That's the one who is really God! Okay, fine—but now you've got to explain how you know it for sure. And if Jehovah in the Old Testament is the real God, why do only Jews and Christians (two billion out of six) believe in him? The other two main contenders (Krishna and Allah) add up only to another two billion. And as usual in Buddhism, there's a whole lot of nothing going on—no God at all. Who's right? What's real? When will we know for sure? Divine Reality, wherefore art thou? If Jehovah or Krishna or Zeus or Allah is the real divine concept, then why are they all minority concepts? Why can't the authentic ruler of the universe successfully persuade everybody that he's the One? Gee whiz, he wouldn't have to persuade everybody; I'd be suitably impressed if one of these divine concepts actually managed to convince a simple majority, say 50.0001% out of the planet's current six billion humans, that he's the Real McConcept. Surely the authentic ruler of the universe can manage that? We humans desperately need to stop squabbling over which one is real, since all we've been hearing for a good two thousand years now is that my concept's gonna lick your concept.

Dare one suggest that maybe these divine concepts aren't all they're cracked up to be? Voltaire famously remarked that if God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.[14] But this is exactly what people have done since the beginning of time—invent their deities. Whatever was needed in a particular time or place produced in people's minds a supernatural entity which possessed the exact type of necessary power. It happened in China, India, Africa, Polynesia, the Americas, and the countries around the Mediterranean—and it continues to happen today. The earliest gods were chthonic, gods of blood and earth and fertility. Later, when people began to practice agriculture and settle in towns, they began to invent more "civilized" gods like Apollo, god of music and poetry, or Minerva, goddess of crafts. But these concepts were nothing but figments of the human imagination, and sometimes pretty dreary ones at that.

You must remember that over the centuries these divine concepts were never static beings—they did quite a lot of evolving. Sooner or later every last one of them changed with the times. At one point in an historical era, a particular divine concept would serve a culture's primary needs, but several hundred years later, when these needs were no longer so pressing, you find the same divine concept taking on new duties or even a new personality. The Greek goddess Hecate is a classic example of this tendency. She started out as a pre-Olympian chthonic deity with ties to the underworld. However, by the end of classical antiquity she had become a goddess of the moon and a bringer of light. In other words, she turned into almost the exact opposite of what she had been when she was first conceptualized. Other Greek goddesses displayed similar mutations. The goddess Artemis started out as a pre-Indo-European sun goddess who eventually turned into a goddess of the moon. When she was associated with the sun, she was protectress of women undergoing childbirth. Several centuries later, when she had turned into the ever-virgin goddess of the moon, women giving birth still called out to her for assistance, despite the obvious fact that an eternal virgin can't offer much help at such a time. So when you talk about Hecate or Artemis, which persona are you talking about? The original one or the later one? Well, the original is as valid as the later one, if you remember that both are simply projections of human imagination and desire. What worked for a culture at one point in its development no longer mattered several centuries later, when people required different qualities in a deity.

Only those people living in the barren terrain of the Middle East managed to come up with a monotheistic deity. Your average Middle East camel driver couldn't imagine multiple deities sprouting forth in his barren landscape—he only needed one. This doesn't mean that Yahweh was any less invented than Zeus or Quezocquatil—it's just that this particular concept was dreamed up in a region which lacked a varied terrain. Is it so outrageous to suggest that the God of Hebrew scripture might be as much a product of human imagination as all the other concepts ever conceived? Especially since we can see plenty of evolution in the Jehovah concept? He even starts out with a different name, Yahweh, and Yahweh, it seems, was originally a Semitic storm god, associated with celestial phenomena, light, and high places. In the earliest books of the Bible this particular divine concept is nothing more than a primitive, jealous, bad-tempered tribal deity, who murders children (the luckless first-born of Egypt), spurs his own troops on to victories, and glories in the deaths of the Philistines. This kind of dictator is nowhere to be found by the time of Amos and Isaiah, when he's turned into the supreme ruler of the universe and comes across as an exemplar of love and justice. He's even changed his name to Jehovah. Why is there no consistency in his personality throughout the Old Testament? Why can't he even keep the same name? Surely God himself ought to be at least minimally consistent? But this is not what we see in the Bible. Different prophets produced different concepts.

Many mythologies have legends about older gods being overthrown by a younger generation, the way Zeus overthrew Saturn, or the way Saturn himself overthrew Uranus. This seems to happen whenever the original qualities of a particular divine concept are no longer relevant to current circumstances. But what's going in these stories on is not so much rebellion as evolution. As people change and learn about other cultures, they want different qualities in their deities, which usually means that the old ones have got to go. Zeus himself was an exhausted divine concept by the end of antiquity, when it was his turn to bite the dust. By the first century CE, people were living in a highly cosmopolitan world, and the stories about the old boy pouncing on his innumerable girlfriends no longer spoke to human spiritual needs. People wanted a new kind of sacredness, and the Zeus persona they had believed in for centuries no longer supplied it, any more than Saturn had supplied it for earlier generations.

It is sometimes amusing to compare different concepts from different cultures. Some concepts are more congenial than others. Quite a few need a lot of self-actualizing inner work. Most of the time they demand endless sacrifices and worship. Almost invariably they are conceived of as being somehow parental. It's also interesting to realize that divine concepts are usually envisioned as some kind of humanoids. Gigantic, supremely powerful humanoids, but humanoids nonetheless. Egypt had a few animal deities as did India, but most of the big shot divinities resemble humans. Now why are human beings so convinced that their deities look like people? Where's the proof? For all we know, the ruler of the universe might be a whale. Or a parakeet. Or a crystal. Or formless energy. It's hubristic of us to think that the ultimate in Divinity is somehow humanoid. Nevertheless, that's how people always see it: as distinctly humanoid and usually of a specific gender, namely male. And the biggest of the big shots aren't just male humanoids, they are always dictatorial. The core reality of your average divine concept is power. Enormous, tremendous, stupefying power, as would befit the ruler of the universe. We Americans want our elected officials to remain within the law, and sometimes it actually happens, but we give our divine concepts the right to do exactly as they please. Don't ask me why we are still envisioning Divinity as some kind of royal despot, nor why we expect church interiors to resemble throne rooms. Bad-tempered royal tyrants went out of fashion several centuries ago, but here in our post-modern world we are still expecting an absolute monarch to be at the core reality of everything.

In the west for the past two thousand years we have had the Jesus concept. Jesus Christ started out as a real human being who possessed some obvious human flaws, but who also possessed quite extraordinary spiritual insight. I have never had any problem with the personality of Jesus as it is presented in the first four gospels. However, what Jesus turned into after his death is another matter altogether. St. Paul seldom or never refers to Jesus as God, and if anyone should know, he should. But the non-divinity of Jesus proved to be unacceptable to subsequent Christian generations. Jesus officially became God at the First Council of Nicea in 325 CE, at which time Jehovah was demoted to one third of a threesome. Poor darling, let's hope he wasn't too upset. Most good Christians have unthinkingly accepted the threesome ever since, even though the threesome thing was not the revelation of a single prophet but a consensus decision from a committee. Here I must admit that a divine concept created by a committee strikes me as particularly irksome. Exactly how much good has ever come out of a committee? What you get in committees are compromises and watered-down consensus. After all the bruising committee meetings I've attended in my life, one thing I know for sure—consensus isn't truth. I don't exactly know what truth is, or where to find it, but I do know what does not engender it, namely committees. A divine concept which has been produced by a committee is not going to be worth a heck of a lot.

The Jesus concept which is around these days would have been unrecognizable to the members of the Nicene Council, not to mention people living in the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, or the Victorian Era. Like other divine concepts, he keeps evolving. Here in the 21^st century Jesus is quite an amiable guy, very much at home in American suburbia, speaking modern instead of Ye Olde Englishe, and proclaiming a message of peace, love, making money, and therapy. Also in recent years he's gotten married. Married and fathered kids to be sure, presumably 2.06 drug-free, career-oriented, ecologically-sensitive types. The idea of Jesus as a happy Daddy would be utterly stupefying to good Christians of the preceding 2,000 years, for whom his celibacy was a perfectly acceptable part of his personality. But there are huge numbers of Americans around these days who cannot fathom the idea of a sexless existence, especially since such a creepy lifestyle is nowhere to be found in Sunbelt suburbia. Jesus has got to be a married man and a father, or else he isn't real to them—he's got to fit right into the country club mainstream. So after two thousand years Jesus has evolved into a Daddy, presumably the kind of Daddy with a barbecue grill and a maxed-out Visa card, since in Sunbelt suburbia there are no other kinds of Daddies.

This conceptualization of Jesus has as much validity as the one dreamed up in Victorian Britain, when Jesus was a Protestant imperialist dutifully engaged in the territorial acquisition of other countries, particularly the ones inhabited by the lesser people with brown skins and the wrong religion. Nowadays we automatically dismiss the idea that God is an Englishman, but the current evidence-free notion that Jesus made an honest woman out of Mary Magdalene is even more breathtakingly silly, and just as useless as any other conceptualization of the Divine. In another hundred years, people will have invented an entirely different Jesus for themselves, presumably "a new Jesus for the 22^nd century". Unless, of course, they finally see the futility of conceptualizing any kind of divine persona. This is something which might start to happen one of these days, but not within my lifetime. As long as human cultures keep changing, on and on the divine evolution will go, and where it stops nobody knows.

Divine evolution has always taken place despite the one thing that seems unchangeable about most major belief systems, namely scripture. All the big traditional religions possess some kind of sacred written words. The existence of scriptural authority gives your average True Believer the illusion that nothing has changed about his religion since its beginning—he is today following the exact utterances which his particular divine concept was once pleased to pronounce. Ah, yes—once upon a time, many centuries ago, God actually talked. And when something divine starts talking, this is invariably considered to be a Momentous Event in the History of All Humanity. If you were a Middle Eastern camel driver living 4,000 or 5,000 years ago, you got to hear the Divine word, but the rest of us just ain't good enough. This idea has always been difficult for me to figure out. If the Middle Eastern camel drivers were the only human beings worthy enough to hear the voice of the Divine, then why were they so ignorant, so prejudiced, so disobedient, so hateful of reason, so eager to smite their enemies, so subservient to tyrants, and so determined to keep their women in second-rate status? Why, in short, did the Almighty pick such a bunch of ignorant bumpkins to be the recipient of his utterances? It might have made better sense to pick a few Greek philosophers to hear the divine discourse, since at least those guys seemed to have intelligent and thoughtful minds, but no, God decided he wanted to talk to the bumpkins.

But how do we know if your average camel driver got it right? The 18th century Deists were hugely skeptical about the authority of scripture. Said Thomas Paine in The Age of Reason:

The most detestable wickedness, the most horrid cruelties, and the greatest miseries, that have afflicted the human race, have had their origin in this thing called revelation, or revealed religion. It has been the most dishonorable belief against the character of the divinity, the most destructive to morality, and the peace and happiness of man, that ever was propagated since man began to exist. It is better, far better, that we admitted, if it were possible, a thousand devils to roam at large, and to parch publicly the doctrine of devils, if there were any such, than that we permitted one such imposter and monster as Moses, Joshua, Samuel, and the Bible prophets, to come with the pretended word of God in whose mouth, and have credit among us.[15]

Tom, you've got a point. I've heard good Christians scoff at the idea that the angel Gabriel gave the word of God to Mohammed, in the same way that they make fun of Joseph Smith getting the right stuff from the angel Moron. But these Christians are still firmly convinced that the prophets in their own Judeo-Christian tradition did manage to get the real stuff from the real concept. I've always been curious: how do they know this for sure? Because it's ancient—it happened several millennia ago? Because Middle Eastern camel drivers were the only people in history good enough to hear the voice of God? Because this is what everybody is taught as a kid in Sunday school? Because Christianity is obviously the world's most superior religion? If there's logic here, I don't see it.

And it always amuses me when True Believers start babbling about their sacred scripture, and how they must always follow it letter for letter, since it possesses all the truth in the universe. But which of the world's scripture actually does contain the truth? The Bible? The Koran? The Bhagavad-Gita? The Book of Mormon? True Believers can never offer evidence as to why their personal revelation is the only one which counts; evidence is irrelevant, they just know theirs is the right one. But how do they know all this? Where is the proof? Exactly nowhere, of course.

What is even more amusing is that these devout True Believers never manage to adhere to everything in their scripture of choice. They pick and choose which of the Official Words they want to obey; the ones they don't like are ignored or explained away. For example, how many times have we heard that the God of the Christian bible considers homosexual behavior a sin, and therefore it cannot be permitted in any Christian society? Well, yes, it is clear that the Bible repeatedly condemns homosexual behavior—there is no question about that. But it is also clear that the Bible condemns marital divorce as much as it condemns homosexuality. If you're a good Christian man and woman when you marry, you marry until death you do part. There is no way around this fact. Jesus himself, in no uncertain terms, explicitly forbids divorce: "Whosoever shall put away his wife, and marry another, committeth adultery against her. And if a woman shall put away her husband, and be married to another, she committeth adultery".[16] Yet this particular scripture is flouted at will by millions of good Christians here at the millennium. Catholics solve the divorce problem by simply declaring that your marriage never existed in the first place. Never mind the fact that the two of you underwent a ceremony, signed papers, lived in the same house for thirty years, and had six children, that doesn't count, we'll annul this nonsense out of existence. I don't know how Protestants rationalize this particular scripture away—maybe they just ignore it? The number of good Fundie Protestants who think they do everything the Bible says but who have no qualms about ditching the nuisance spouse whenever necessary is growing exponentially.

The Bible also repeatedly condemns money and the lust for it thereof. Jesus states, "If thou will be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me"[17] I'm still waiting for one single Episcopal minister, Catholic bishop, TV preacher, or born-again songstress to give away all they have and start living like a lily of the field. Money is the root of all evil, I guess, except when it is possessed by True Believing Christians, who tend to go through life with their heads up their assets. In the meantime, why, we've got to outlaw all those gays since the Bible tells us to!

Good Moslems, by the way, indulge in the scripture pick-and-choose game as much as do good Christians. All the exhortations to mercy and protection in the Koran are conveniently ignored by your average suicide bomber. I've yet to find anything in the Koran about the famous seventy-two virgins you get to spend eternity with if you slaughter hundreds of other human beings at the same time you kill yourself. Imagine that: a scripture which does not exist. No wonder it can say just about anything.

At any rate, don't expect your average True Believer to change how they perceive their divine concept or sacred scripture any time soon. They will inevitably hang on to belief system for dear life, and usually by their fingernails. There is nothing more terrifying to certain types of cowardly minds than doubting the truth of their religion. Never can they allow any kind of crack in their belief system or let themselves start to wonder how they know what they've be taught is true. When the imaginary concept's in his heaven, all's not right with the world—and fanaticism, terror, and irrational hatreds abound. There are better things to do with your fingernails than clutching desperately at your religion of choice. Just start using your fingernails to claw your way out of whatever organized spiritual system has been shoved down your throat by Mom and Dad and Pumpum. Then you will be able to open up some light and clarity in your life. Indeed, realizing that your religion's official version of "God" is only a make-believe fantasy which has been invented by fallible human beings can be the single most liberating experience any human being can ever have. The only way you can make it to the Territory is through rebellion. This has been happening since Prometheus stole fire from Zeus and was rewarded for his efforts by being chained to a mountain for ten thousand years. Talk about raw deals. "Freedom is for Zeus, and Zeus alone," announces one of the characters in Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound.[18] Wrong, wrong, wrong. You're as free as Zeus when you realize that good old Zeus isn't the all-powerful ruler of the universe but yet another human imagining which will inevitably be forgotten in the clear light of eternity.

Well, enough about divine bullies and unsacred scripture. I need to get back to the flying broom, don't I? Spiritual liberation is the point of these exhortations, remember, not spiritual imprisonment. And spiritual liberation will inevitably happen whenever you climb on board your beautiful broomstick and zoom upwards into the skies. Janet, it occurs to me that I still haven't told you how to put the broom together. This is when it gets fun.

Prometheus lives!

Mona

* * *

February 15

So now we get to craft our flying broom. If you want to be a witch, you've got to be a crafter. Witch and crafter. Now isn't that clever? Sometimes I get so brilliant I astound myself.

Are you aware that the word craft originally meant force or strength? But it was strength in the sense of creation, skill, and accomplishment instead of ego. This is witchcraft in its original sense, when crafting mattered in people's lives. I have long been convinced that pre-industrial people were healthier and saner than us post-moderns because they spent their lives surrounded by objects which they had made themselves: quilts, tools, baskets, and furniture. I once saw an exhibition of Shaker artifacts and was astonished by the superb beauty of everything they had created. Without question the Shakers produced the most exquisite handicrafts in American history. Their knowledge of the potentials of their materials enabled them to go far beyond simple craftwork into a kind of reality where the physical becomes spiritual. A Shaker chair is much more than a simple piece of furniture. It is an artifact which somehow seems to exist outside of normal three-dimensional reality. It must have been quite an experience to sit in it. Shaker crafts are as virtuous as anything can possibly get.

There's never been any mystery to me why the goddess Minerva is goddess of both wisdom and of handicrafts. She is goddess of wisdom because of her ability at handicraft. You can acquire copious amounts of wisdom if you have the skill to bring objects into being through the efforts of your own hands. I've always felt that doing things manually with your own muscles is one of the healthiest things we can ever experience. It is a way to put your body into connection with something solid, something that can be felt and manipulated. Matter matters. Start interacting with earth, stone, iron, wood, or mud, and you will see what I mean. And don't forget that whenever you bring form into being, you are also helping to sustain the creative energies of the universe. It is no exaggeration to say that all we can know about the universe is that it is constantly making and remaking itself through the use of creative energy. Not that we can be sure there is some kind of divinity who is consciously precipitating this creativity, but it's obvious that newness is continually happening.

Your average post-modern professor would probably sneer at the preceding statements. He would start babbling about the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states that in an enclosed system things wear down to the point of dissolution, otherwise known as entropy. This is a concept which is very attractive to fashionably pessimistic minds, who tend to forget that there are no closed systems in nature. I would agree that there is plenty of entropy around these days, but at the same time other forms and energies are constantly being generated. In our universe there is always a continual balance between destruction and creation. Creative transformation keeps happening, and it always will. We should thank our stars for that.

Let us also be grateful for the intensity of experience that creativity can generate. I happen to be a great fan of intense experiences. If you're going to have an experience, whether spiritual, sensual, or intellectual, you may as well have one that's intense, or else why bother? Maximizing intensity is what counts in an interesting life, not the number of frequent flier miles you rack up, or the contents of your wardrobe, or continual entertainment. And if you want to experience the ultimate in concentrated zaps, you have to do only one simple thing, namely turn yourself into a successful creator. Those moments when potentiality manifests out of the depths of your soul can provide you with such an intense feeling of aliveness that everything else about your existence will fade into silhouette. Happiness is agreeable thing to experience, I suppose, but it is nothing compared to those ecstatic flashes of supreme joy we feel when we lose ourselves in pure creativity.

I have always felt that handicrafts are the greatest human creations. They are worth infinitely more than the high fallutin' stuff like oil paintings, marble statues, golden cutlery, or anything else locked up in glass cases at the Chicago Art Institute. Not everyone can create high art, but anyone can work a craft, especially if you work with primal materials. Yet how many of us in our frantic world ever manage it? Hobbies are frequently the lowest of low priorities for too many people these days, which is a pity. Without a way to manifest form in your life, you aren't really alive. This is one of the reasons why so many intellectual types constantly make a mess out of everything, especially politics. They have never felt or interacted with anything physical in their lives. Even worse: they don't see any necessity to do so. They exist in a world composed solely of words, which is, as far as I'm concerned, a world that is completely dead.

This brings me back to what we need to craft at the moment, namely a flying broom. Fortunately the art of crafting a broom has not been lost. When I was ready to put my broom together, I headed off to the public library to do more research. I found what I needed almost immediately, namely an article entitled "Brooms and Brushes" in Foxfire 3.[19] The Foxfire books were a series of books about old-fashioned "affairs of plain living" which were popular in the 1970s, when a lot of people still dreamed about a non-yuppie life on the land. The "Brooms and Brushes" article proved to be an interview with an Appalachian old-timer who had been making brooms his entire life. He'd been quite successful at it, too, although there was no indication that he had ever aspired to upwardness. But it was obvious that this article was the real stuff about real brooms. The craftsman had first talked about harvesting the broom corn. He explained that you needed to cut the stalk off about two joints away from the bristles. Then you peeled off the exterior layers and used a comb to remove the seeds. Finally you let the bristles dry for several hours in the sun. He used sourwood saplings as staffs. These must have been perfectly adequate, but they did not conjure up any vision of Heathcliff for me. Also the craftsman hammered two nails into the staff to help secure the bristles, which he then attached to the staff with strong cotton string. Elementary simplicity.

So one beautiful Saturday afternoon in October, I did it. I crafted the broom. It only took me an hour or so. First I hammered the nails into the staff. Then I soaked the bristles as directed by the Foxfire article, which recommends that you pour boiling water over the stalks to soften them first. As soon as they were pliable, I threaded them with the string. This proved to be as easy as mending a sock. I also liked the craftsman's idea of tying the stalks to the staff in a circular fashion, which made for more of a round brush than a flat one. This struck me as highly appropriate for my purposes, since a circular form would be more appropriate for levity than something rectangular. After all, anything circular has always been symbolic of spiritual reality: think of harmony, balance, or centeredness. So I ended up wrapping the bristles evenly around the staff. Nothing could have been easier.

Now you are probably wondering if I recited some kind of magic spell as I worked. Well, there was no need for that, for two reasons: (1) I didn't have a clue what kind of spell to use, and (2) I was crafting, and there is nothing as unnecessary as a magic spell when you're working with physical materials. Finally the broom was finished, and if I do say so myself, never in the history of sweeping floors had there been a more fabulous broom. Staff and bristles were in perfect alignment. I took the broom outdoors and held it up in the sunlight. It was glowing with life; indeed, it felt like it wanted to leap out of my hands. It had taken me months upon months to reach this moment. After the interminable research I had done, after the endless cogitation that had left my brain in perfect mush, after the countless dead ends I had run into, I had finally done it. I had crafted a broom which was the absolute ultimate in lev perfection. At long last upwardness was going to be mine. The only thing left to do was ascend into the sky above me.

I took a firm hold of the staff, straddled it, waved goodbye to the dog, and— and—

Nothing happened.

"Let's go, broom!" I cried. "Levity! Levity!"

Still nothing happened. Only then did it hit me. How was the broom supposed to fly? I had been so obsessed with researching the broom, growing the broom, and crafting the broom that it had never once entered my head that the thing would not automatically lift off the ground the minute I put it together.

How utterly typical of me. I had created the perfect witch's broom, but I didn't have a clue how to use it. Jeepers, talk about blind spots! I guess we all have our blind spots, but this hadn't been a blind spot as much as it was a blind football field. Where had been my head? Why hadn't I realized that there had to be more to getting up into the air than just crafting an idiot broom? I realized that I wasn't at the end of anything. I was in exactly the same place I had been since I started on my grand quest for upwardness: nowhere. What on earth was I supposed to do next?

As always,

Moron Mona

* * *

February 20

It's good to hear that you're going to sign up for a pottery class next semester. You tell me that it wasn't until you read my last e-mail that you started thinking about getting involved with crafts. Bravo Janet! This is a step in the right direction. Give handicraft a chance, and it can open up a whole new universe for you. I don't mean that you have to give up canvas and paint, let alone Adobe Photoshop, but it's always a good idea to try something new. Keep your mind open like this, and you will never reach the kind of dead end I found myself that memorable afternoon in October. I had finally crafted the perfect broom, but the perfect broom wasn't cooperating. Why was wrong now? What more did I need except a handcrafted witch's broom in order to fly?

I was still convinced that my original intuition about a flying broomstick had been correct, namely that the ultimate secret to upwardness was somehow metaphysical or spiritual. Witches took to the skies because they got a Zen-like spiritual liberation from all that upwardness. But this illumination had been the only bit of truth which had come to me. In everything else I had failed. So it was obviously time to do some more thinking. I spent the next several evenings in my rocking chair on the porch, dismally trying to figure out what I needed to do next, but nothing would come. My mind was as empty as Reality TV. All I could do was kick myself over and over for my foolishness. A rational human being would have realized that she needed more than a carefully crafted broom in order to get off the ground. Well, rational wasn't the way to describe Moron Mona, who could have given lessons to the entire planet on the subject of human dumbness. And as for spiritual liberation . . . maybe Zen masters had achieved it over the centuries, or so they claimed, but as for me I was stuck with my feet upon the ground.

But the idea of a Zen master got me thinking. I remembered that European witches were not the only human beings in history who managed to defy gravity. Eastern cultures possessed as many tales about human beings flying through the air as we have in the West—there are dozens of stories about levitating Tibetan lamas and Chinese Daoists. The great Chinese poet Lie Zi was especially celebrated for his ability to ride on the wind and float through the clouds, and I had read somewhere that he made his secrets available to his disciples.[20] Perhaps I needed to track down some of his writings and see what I could find. I hadn't forgotten that I had wasted months upon months researching European witchcraft records, but maybe I was researching the wrong records. If I started to look at Chinese sources, those rare and esoteric ones that hardly anybody bothered about, I might easily discover the Secret.

I decided that this was an excellent idea. You must understand that I have always been fascinated with Daoism and other Oriental belief systems. Once you start studying Eastern ways of thinking and doing, you can acquire a whole new perspective on your existence. I have also liked the fact that Zen is not so much a religion as a system of mental discipline, and a very practical one at that. At its best, it's a way to live the fullest possible life in harmony with the energies of the natural world, which is something that any aspiring poet needs. There has always been an independent, self-reliant aspect to Zen, which Zen enthusiast Alan Watts called beat Zen, which I have always liked as well.[21] The ideal Zen master is very much like the ideal American cowboy: wandering where he pleases, living as he likes, having few belongings, and possessing a full share of Emersonian self-reliance. This is the way you've got to live if you ever do make it to the Territory.

Lots of people who have never studied Zen don't understand that its meditative techniques are not so much a way to control your mind as they are a way to let things go. Specifically, a way to let go of your thoughts. Compulsive thoughts are one of the most horrendous sources of bondage in our lives. Most of us carry a miniature mind tyrant inside our heads who is always commanding us to think only what he wants us to think. Every time an unwelcome thought pops into our head, the tyrant goes into action, puts a gun to our temple, and starts barking out the commands: Think me! Think me! Think me! Which is what most people thereupon do, idiots that they are. How many times have you heard some say, "I just can't stop thinking about it?" Well, they could stop any time they liked, if they started practicing Zen. Once you learn how to let go of your compulsive thoughts, you can learn to let go of anything. Just let it go. The great Buddhist secret of non-clinging. At mid-life I have concluded that the art of letting go is the best psychological medicine ever conceived. If you learn how to let things go, up to and including your compulsive thoughts, you might very well discover that you've turned . . . sane. Emerson was also a great believer in the art of letting go. He tells us over and over again that we need to break away from everything that's dead or bad for us in our lives and move into new space. He was right. Whenever you try to cling to something that is over and done with, all you do is waste energy. Learn to let go of your thoughts, and you will discover that you can start letting go of everything else as well, up to and including your abusive boyfriend, your pack-a-day habit, your craving for Hagen-Daas, or your participation in a religious system that's completely petrified. By the way, have you guessed why I named my dog Ralph? Emily is not my only hero—the great Waldo matters just as much.

So, yes, Zen can have some definite psychological value,

but . . . Here I must admit that there is a lot about Zen Buddhism which I don't care for. Individual aspects of Zen are wondrously enchanting, but Zen as a whole is a brutally cold-hearted system. There is no way it can supply you with all the spiritual answers that you need. I have spent many years attempting to swallow Zen hook, line and nothingness, but I've never succeeded. The nothingness is the problem. Zen toes the official Buddhist line that life is suffering and the world is an illusion. Well, okay, if that's what you want to believe, but I think this is a ghastly negation of the value of our earthly existence. Have you ever seen a Zen garden? Zen gardens sum up everything you need to know about Eastern spiritual beliefs, namely rocks. Very carefully chosen, very carefully displayed . . . rocks. Nothing else but. No herbs, no flowers, no color, no scent, no vegetables, no herbs, no earthworms, no burgeoning life bursting out of the soil, and not even any talking petunias. Just rocks. Which presumably go to show that the world is an illusion. A Zen rock garden is often brilliantly pure and dazzlingly beautiful, but there's a whole lot of nothing going on. Nothing better sums up the essence of Zen: a great big saying NO to life. I've heard Buddhists explain many times that this isn't nihilism, but if you ask me, that's exactly where it leads.

It also leads to quietism. This is another problem with Oriental spiritual systems: they don't fill you with new life or energy—they simply paralyze you, both personally and culturally. One thing Buddhists are not known for is rebellion. In the West, where people and objects are thought to be real, rebels have been making trouble for millennia. No matter what the presiding paradigm, whether social or religious, people in western cultures have always challenged it, from Prometheus's defiance of Zeus, through the rebellious English barons who forced the king to grant the Magna Carta, and right up to Emily Brontë herself. All of whom made the world a better place. If it had not been for generation after generation of aggressive western egos refusing to tolerate the status quo, I would be living out my life as an illiterate kitchen wench. I've always been glad that Rosa Parks didn't go home that night to her meditation cushion so she could practice non-attachment and compassion.

But where in the entire history of Buddhism can you find someone who questioned any of its basic premises? Nowhere that I can see, unless you count those contemporary American converts who have started to criticize the status of women in Buddhist cultures. Predictably it's only people brought up in the West who see a need of reform. Buddhist rebels in Buddhist societies seem to be non-existent. More than two thousand years of unrebellion is not my idea of a healthy spiritual system. And if you look at Japan today, you can only wonder—all that "way-of-liberation" Zen, but where the heck are the liberated people? Japan has never been anything except a relentlessly oppressive society, an oppression which continues to this day when the country is theoretically democratic. Nowadays the Japanese problem isn't tyrannical shoguns—it's corporate repression. Japanese kids have to study twenty hours a day to pass their exams, since if they flunk out they won't get that fabulous corporate job which they are brainwashed into wanting. Groupthink is the only mindset that prevails. Bondage to the boss is the norm. The Japanese are not just regimented workers; they are also regimented consumers, suffering under the delusion that the right to make a purchase constitutes happiness. You can just barely say no to corporate America, but there is no way you can say no to the merciless horrors of corporate Japan. You conform, or else you don't exist.

And where in Japan do you find liberated women? Conjure up in your mind the image of a Japanese woman, and what do you immediately see? A sweet little wifey, of course. There is no wifey anywhere on earth like a Japanese wifey. Not only do you get to wash his socks and fix his meals, you get to light his cigarettes, clip his toenails, and apologize for your shortcomings every two or three minutes. And don't you dare complain about those hookers on his business trips! Japan is apparently the only country in the world where women elect to have hymen repair surgery prior to their weddings. In modern democratic Japan, if you're not a virgin on your wedding night, you're a dead duck. That is to say, she's got to be a virgin, nobody expects it of the guy. Imagine that! A double standard!

If you take a close look at the political history of Oriental countries, all you see are millennia after millennia of the most horrendous despotism, the kind that would make Mussolini or Franco drool with envy. The relentless passivity of Eastern spiritual systems tends to create the worst kind of political passivity. When you're told that nothing is real, why bother to resist the tyrant? When renunciation is the supreme value, why care about free speech or the value of the individual? Even Daoism, the most likable of Eastern belief systems, never developed into a way of resisting the tyranny of Chinese despots. Ideas have consequences. The complete loss of self which is the aim of so much Eastern thought does nothing but negate everything that can be great and glorious about human existence, up to and including the integrity of each individual personality. The fact that Eastern spiritual systems are always turning away from human reality is not so much a sign of spiritual maturity as an indication that these systems developed under systems of atrocious political tyranny. No wonder Buddhists kept telling themselves century after century that the world was an illusion. What better way to endure the despotic repression of their cultures?

There is a story about the Stoic philosopher Epictetus, who found an infant which had been left exposed to die. Epictetus brought the child home and adopted him, even though this placed a great burden upon his resources and his attempts to live a philosophical life. I sometimes wonder what would happen if an enlightened Buddhist had found an infant in a similar situation. Would he also have rescued the child? Or would he have responded with something like this: I'm reacting with sadness and compassion to your plight, kid, but sayonara, you're keeping me from my meditation cushion. Yes, I suppose I'm exaggerating. But I have never once read an anecdote about a Zen master saving the life of a child. In Buddhist reality, saving the life of a child isn't worth recording, not compared to what really matters, namely how the master reached enlightenment. There are countless Zen stories about how assorted great masters reached enlightenment. So-and-so observed a flock of geese, and he was enlightened. Someone else was told to take out his mind and show it to the master, and he was enlightened. Open up any book on Zen, and you will find dozens of anecdotes about how assorted Zen masters got the great big E—but nothing about what happened afterwards. The practical results of enlightenment. The only historical detail good Buddhists recorded about their spiritual superiors is the fact that they actually managed to get themselves enlightened. That's it. Enough said. Why should they bother about earthly nuisances like educating women or finding a cure for malaria when they've finally got the only thing that matters—enlightenment! It's only in the West where you find people like Teresa of Avila actually doing something after having had a supreme spiritual experience. I can only assume that enlightened Zen masters simply settled down to spend the rest of their lives on their meditation cushion until they floated off to the Nirvana bucket. A fat lot of good that did for anyone or anything.

There is a famous legend of a Zen monk who discovered that he was just as miserable after enlightenment as he was before. That great moment of perfect illumination was not enough to eradicate his negative behavior patterns, let alone instill wisdom. So much for the benefits of one hand clapping. My own experience tells me that life is a process, and that one single event, however valuable, cannot eradicate lifelong prejudices, bad habits, or self-centered desires. Dare one suggest that satori isn't all it's cracked up to be? Zen enthusiast Alan Watts was always at his most irritating when he tried to persuade us that the ultimate in human goodness is sitting and meditating, while the spring comes and the grass grows by itself.[22] This is the strict Buddhist line: just let things happen and everything will be in harmony. Meanwhile tyrants murder whomever they please, corruption and injustice cover the earth, fanatics spew forth their hatred, and the environment suffers continual degradation, something which is bad enough in this country but also horribly widespread in Asian cultures. Watts was criticizing those kinds of earnest do-gooders, plentiful in Western society, who manage to pave the road to Hell with good intentions. To a certain extent he was right. Some of the most repellent human beings who have ever walked the earth are those self-righteous egomaniacs who manage to engender nothing but chaos and misery. But good intentions sometimes actually do good. I know I'm living a better life than my ancestors thanks to developments in Western technology, which never would have happened if people just let the grass grow. What would our world be like if not a single human being had ever striven to make things better? Where would we be if all people, in all cultures, at all times throughout human history, had plastered their derrières to a meditation cushion and spent their entire existence focusing on inwardness to the exclusion of everything around them?

The whole Zen idea of not clinging can also be overdone. Buddhists emphasize it to the point of negating every last damn thing. But does this do any good? Does it engender wisdom? You cannot extinguish all your desires and expect to live as a functioning human being on planet earth. Besides, what about our desires for art or music or nature? A desire to lead a genuinely ethical existence? A desire to love and to commune with other human beings, or even with the Divine? A desire to make the world somehow better than we found it? The whole idea of not clinging, and the idea of self-negation that goes with it, can be as repressive as anything else that enslaves us. And must everything in the physical world be dismissed as illusion? Buddha would have us renounce the world around us, but when the sunsets are blazing with scarlet and gold, or the moon is sailing across the sky, or Beethoven is playing on the radio . . . what is there to renounce?

Think for a minute about the statues of the Buddha which you have seen and then compare them to that penultimate Western sculpture, Michelangelo's David. The stone Buddhas found throughout Asia are some of the most supremely beautiful sculptures ever created. A well-carved Buddha can exhibit such spiritual intensity that it almost radiates light. But the focus of these statues is exclusively inward. Their eyes are always half-closed since there is no reason to look upon a world which does not exist. Should the emperor kidnap your daughter in order to make her his 124^th concubine, don't think about going to one of these dreamy frozen Buddhas for help, since he won't even blink. Then compare one of these Buddhas to the David. The eyes of the David are open and staring. He is encountering something that happens to be real, namely a bully called Goliath, and he intends to defy him. He is not looking inward, self-indulgently chasing a phantom called enlightenment, nor is he casting his gaze upwards, imploring the assistance of an invisible deity. He is standing solidly on the earth, and he is about to rebel, an attitude that is incomprehensible to Eastern societies unless they have been influenced by Western thought. Let us remember that David was the great symbol of Florentine political liberty, which is why Michelangelo carved him as the ultimate in human magnificence. This enormous statue is telling us that when you decide to defy the despot, you become a god. In the West you are at your most spiritual, not when you're sitting in meditation, but when you stand your ground in order to right a wrong.

Sometimes action needs to happen. Doing is as important in our lives as being. It is true that meditative techniques can clear the mind and promote serenity, but too much of it drains energy that could better be used for something else. Abraham Maslow's idea of a fully self-actualized human being was not some kind of dummy who spent ten hours a day staring at a wall, but someone who was imaginative, creative, and active when necessary.[23] In the West we are very well aware of the value of action. Not that action necessarily needs to be political—it can also be creative. The ultimate in human fulfillment comes from meeting challenges, being resourceful, and engendering new form. Obsessive meditators are never going to produce Hamlet, or the Starry Night, or Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, or an Apple computer, or a cure for AIDS. For these you need struggle, tension, perception, and stress. You need to encounter someone or something that's real, a problem or a natural object or another human being, and then let inspiration happen. But Buddhism makes no allowance for encounters. How can you encounter anything when nothing is real, after all?

Janet, it occurs to me I've wandered away from my subject again. This is what flying on a broomstick does to you—turns you into a wanderer. I must remind myself that getting up into the air is what you want to hear about, not the entrapments of oriental belief systems. And yes, they are just one more spiritual entrapment. I finally realized that if I started to research ancient Chinese or Zen texts for the secret to upwardness, it would be another waste of time. So what could I possibly do next? Where was the answer?

At this critical juncture I proceeded to make another mistake. Knowing me as you do, this will not come as a surprise. And herein hangs another tale.

Mona

* * *

February 26

Sweetie, thanks a lot for sending me your list of all the mistakes you can remember I've made in my life. It makes me feel all warm inside to discover that you've been keeping track. But you don't seem to realize that your appealing little list is a whole lot of nothing, at least compared to what I am about to describe next, when your moron aunt turned into the world's most super colossal nincompoop.

So what went wrong this time? I discovered that I was not the only witch alive and kicking on planet earth. To my astonishment I realized that there were plenty of other witches living all over the country. They existed even in Carver, Illinois. At least they were calling themselves witches. Or Neo-Pagans. Or something non-Christian. These witches were holding ceremonies, teaching classes, writing books, and being interviewed. They were even casting authentic witch spells. There were people I could meet, groups that I could join, things that I could learn. These witches claimed to be practicing a prehistoric pagan spirituality which was based on spiritual traditions that had flourished in the centuries before Christianity. Modern witchcraft was a movement. It had converts. It was getting organized. I wasn't the only witch on the face of the earth—I could be part of a community. Holy cow. And if there were that many witches around, surely at least one of them had figured out how to fly on a broom! Perhaps I didn't have to reinvent the broomstick after all! Maybe I could hook up with a real, live, levitating witch, and she would show me the way! Modern Neo-Pagan witchcraft seemed to be exactly what I needed. So I dove right in, predictably forgetting to notice that the swimming pool was empty.

The first thing I discovered was that the modern witchcraft movement was not particularly new. It had been around since the 1940s, when a British civil servant named Gerald Gardner began publishing books on witchcraft. He claimed that in the late 1930s he had been initiated into one of the last remaining covens in Britain. This group was purportedly practicing an underground spiritual tradition that went back to the Stone Age. These people, mind you, were most emphatically not interested in practicing Satanic evil. They simply wanted to indulge in their pleasant and harmless spiritual tradition. Gerald Gardner claimed that he knew all sorts of fabulous hidden secrets, and in his book Witchcraft Today he announced that he now had a good reason for making these secrets public for the first time, namely so that they would not be lost. He must have been a graduate of the Pravda School of Factual Integrity.

His claims were sheer fantasy, of course. Subsequent scholarship has cast considerable doubt upon Gardner's pretenses. Historians nowadays conclude that Gardner concocted a religious system culled from folk traditions about witchcraft and any other source that seemed plausible—Theosophy, American nature writing, Eastern yogic practices, the ceremonies of medieval magicians, and even a book about Ozark witches published in 1947.[24] In particular, Gardner and his friends were inspired by a book entitled The Witch Cult in Western Europe, written by an Egyptian scholar named Margaret Murray. Murray claimed that groups of witches had managed to survive the centuries by organizing themselves into secret covens. These covens existed outside the control of both church and state but were nevertheless connected with each other and followed prehistoric spiritual traditions. Gardner and his friends apparently decided to organize themselves into Murray's idea of coven in the early days of World War II, where they did their tidy best in the fight against Hitler. Nothing wrong here—this part of the story I like. To his credit Gardner also had a hand in the creation of the British Home Guard. Gardner's professional career indicates that he was a reasonably decent middle-class Brit who was a credit to his country.

It's only when you start examining the movement he founded that you see that he was also one of the most thoroughly disreputable pumpums who has ever managed to rope in the suckers. Not that he probably ever admitted this to himself—he might have honestly believed that he was reviving a lost pagan religion. But everything else about him screams phony, phony, phony. When you read his books, it is obvious that he did possess a certain genius for making plausible claims. He was even more aware of the value of Ye Olde Englishe than any American pumpum you care to name, and the rules and regulations he concocted for his movement were sprinkled with more examples of thees and thous than anything you can find in The Book of Mormon. Plus plenty of ests stuck on ends of verbs as in mayest or mightest, and lots of charmingly antique phrases such as So mote it be, ardane! Blessed be! Io Evo! Huh? Well, who cared, it sounded mysterious. Gardner also took whatever he could find from numerous late 19^th century groups practicing what became known as "spiritual occultism", principally the practices of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

Ah, yes—the celebrated Golden Dawn. Anyone who's interested in alternative spirituality has heard of this organization, which is the most famous occult association of modern times. Its fame is not surprising since the guys who put it together possessed an unparalleled genius for public relations. They not only managed to hoodwink numerous contemporaries into believing that they possessed numerous Great Big Fat Occult Secrets, but subsequent generations have been equally deluded about the value of those mysterious secrets. Not that the secrets were so very secret. If you were a good boy or girl and paid every penny of your Golden Dawn membership dues, you might get to be initiated into their esteemed organization so that you could learn the Secrets, too. The practices of this organization were supposedly based on old mysterious manuscripts that had been hidden away somewhere, somehow, until they were conveniently unearthed right about the time certain people needed to collect membership fees.

And what were these practices? Simple. The Golden Dawn members came together to perform various ceremonial rituals. Rituals which were obviously based on Masonic practices or other well-documented rites, such as those of the Rosicrucians or medieval ceremonial magicians. Janet, are you in any way familiar with the lives and characters of medieval ceremonial magicians? If not, the first thing you should know about these charming gentlemen is that they could have taught a thing or two to the late Al Capone. Medieval ceremonial magicians were into power trips such as you would not believe. Lots of their grimoires have survived into the modern world, such as The Key of Solomon the King, which is a classic textbook on how to make magic: cast a circle, call in the elements, and do the working. But their empty charades were nothing more than a determined exercise to acquire and maintain power, more power, endless power, permanent power. What is "magic" after all but an attempt to exercise control over something or someone other than yourself? You search the records of ceremonial magicians in vain for any sense of mystical vision or spiritual freedom. What you find instead are pages upon pages of grim determination to get and maintain power. For hundreds of years now, clout has been the name of the magical game, and by the time the Golden Dawn was established, it was still the only game in town.

People nowadays tend to forget that the Golden Dawn was an ineffectual organization right from the start. The surviving records of this sorry association relate a history of grandstanding power plays, venomous back-stabbings, territorial stake-outs, tantrum-throwing, lust for coin of the realm, and a constant obsession with acquiring and maintaining the clout. Of course, not all the members were power-hungry maniacs: William Butler Yeats was a member for a while, as was the great British mystic Evelyn Underhill, and Pamela Colman Smith, who designed the world's most brilliant Tarot deck. But most of the personalities who congregated under this particular roof were some of the most unpleasant egomaniacs ever to come together. Who's in charge, who's giving the orders, who's running the show . . . this was all that mattered. Which is only to be expected from a group of human beings obsessed with the occult. Once thing I've learned over the years about occultists is that they are never interested in the known past, but only in the stuff that has allegedly been hidden behind the scenes for countless centuries. This is supposed to be what's really valuable in civilization, the lost wisdom of the ancient world. Not history or science or art, or anything you might get out of Plato or Dante, but those esoteric details of secret Knight Templar ceremonies, or Gnostic mysteries, or Daoist alchemy, or whatever. How exciting it must be to discover that you are superior enough to learn about enormous earth-shattering mysterious secrets which have been hidden away for centuries! The rest of the slobs on the planet can eat their hearts out. Right, thanks a lot, guys.

But if these secrets are so valuable, then why are occultists so determined to keep them secret? Why don't they shout what they know it from the rooftops for the benefit of all and sundry? Am I kidding? Occultists, up to and including the megalomaniacs of the Golden Dawn, aren't people who pay attention to the problems of this world. Oh, no—they're too smart for that, they get to spend years of their lives pursuing those great big fat secrets. The secrets are apparently the end in themselves, since once you've figured them out, there's no where else to go. Presumably you can't even float off to Nirvana since in the occult world not even Nirvana matters. Who gives a darn about new ways to solve social problems, or promoting democratic tendencies, or defending freedom of speech, or anything else that might benefit civilization? Poets, philosophers, artists, visionary political leaders, and even (gasp!) teachers make contributions to human civilization. But occultists? What a silly question. After eleven years of constant quarrelling, the Golden Dawn imploded. Would the organization have fallen to pieces so quickly if any of its members were truly in possession of some kind of valuable spiritual knowledge? I doubt that there has ever been any kind of "ancient secret" or "hidden truth" which has ever done people good at any point in human history. But it is easy to see why weak and timid personalities will latch onto stuff like this. What better way to puff yourself up! How much easier than the terrors of trying something new! Forget about the strength needed to forge your own destiny or do something creative—just keep looking forever backwards at those mysteries and secrets. I guarantee that it will be as easy as swallowing a pill to make you lose weight.

The famed Aleister Crowley was a member of the Golden Dawn for a while, and his writings were another source that Gerald Gardner mined for his religion. Crowley liked to call himself the Great Beast, which is almost as good as calling yourself a witch to get yourself noticed (also it is guaranteed to increase royalties). A more appropriate title for Crowley would have been the Great Bozo, or perhaps the Other End of a Horse. Crowley was yet another a master manipulator out to lord it over whatever suckers he could lure into his orbit, and was he supposed to care that dozens of his followers ended up destitute, insane, or just plain dead? The one thing I've read about Crowley which has always stuck in my mind was his recommended way of casting a magical circle as delineated in one of his novels: take four cats and impale them. That's right, a sword or a stake right through the poor animal's gut, but not through the heart since that way they'd die too quickly. Then prop them up at the four quarters of your circle. All to make sure that "their agony should frighten away undesirable spirits".[25] Now here is a master spiritual leader from whom we can learn so much.

The surviving evidence indicates that Gerald Gardner was Crowley's equal in deviousness and manipulation. We should remember that the only thing Gardner was doing with his witchcraft prattle was inventing his own religion, in the grand old tradition of the Smith Religion, the Hubbard Religion, the Eddy Religion, the Blavatsky Religion, the Bhagwan Religion, or whatever other pumpum religion you care to name. But Gardner quickly realized that he couldn't just announce that he had invented Gerald Gardner's religion—who would be interested in that? So he had to call it something. He might have called it the Druid Religion (maybe he could convince the suckers he had hooked up with one of the last surviving groups of British Druids), or the Pict Religion, or the Atlantis Religion. But he decided to proclaim that what he was doing was witchcraft, which was sheer public-relations genius. As pumpums go, Gardner was so skilled at manipulation, manufactured evidence, and con jobs in general, that he might as well have been an American.

So what kind of religion did Gardner put together? What kind of metaphysics or spirituality did he emphasize? I can't answer these questions since Gardner himself never bothered. The only thing that mattered to him was theatrics. Also known as ritual. Gardner was fixated on one thing only: what kind of ceremony he could get his suckers to perform whenever they came together. Now I will admit that the structure of a spiritual ritual is always of prime importance to anyone trying to establish a religion, but with Gardner nothing else mattered. The correct ceremony was all in all. Margaret Murray had claimed that witches would congregate at gatherings which she called Sabbaths, but what witches did at these Sabbaths she could not say, since nothing had survived. So Gardner had to invent his own rituals, and predictably he based them upon what he had learned from the back-stabbing theatrics of the Golden Dawn.

Here I cannot help but see a parallel to nothing less than the late unlamented Third Reich. What was pre-war Nazi Germany anyway, except one great big ritualistic show? It was those bone-chilling Nuremberg rallies which turned most of the German population brain dead. Even the people who had originally opposed Hitler were thrown for a loop by the magnificence of the Nazi rituals. If you watch Leni Reifenstal's Triumph of the Will, you can get a horrifying sense of the power of Nazi ritual. The impact of these ceremonies helped to mask the fact that at its core there wasn't much of anything about the Nazi religion, apart from a few vague ideas of racial superiority. No philosophy, no ethics, no eschatology, no vision, no art, not even any good cookbooks—exactly the kind of meaningless void to be found at the heart of the Gardner religion. But the void is not immediately apparent when you're busy watching the show. And when you do watch that show, you are being manipulated. This is the basis of religious ritual—some kind of manipulation. What the Nazi leaders were geniuses at, and what the pumpums of this world are still trying to do to us, is get us to attend some sort of ceremonial where they can manipulate us.

Janet, have you ever thought about what a religious ceremony means? Or why it should happen? Or what kind of effect it should have? One thing I've learned over the years is that the kind of people who are attracted to repetitive ceremonial forms are the sort of second-raters who are stuck about everything in their lives and who do not possess the courage to change themselves for the better. It is only these kinds of cowards who desperately want things to remain forever the same, day in and day out for the rest of eternity. Well, perpetual repetition is my idea of hell. There is nothing quite so imprisoning as endless duplication of the same patterns throughout your life. This is otherwise known as the ultimate in decadence. It has been frequently noticed that the most decadent human types are the ones who are most attracted to repetitive rituals, the kind of ceremonial where the same thing keeps happening over and over. Those late 19^th century writers who turned Catholic did so not because of the theology or even the hope of a ticket to eternity. They converted because they were so enamored of the relentless sameness of the Catholic mass. Well, they got what they deserved: living out their lives in a tense prison of their own making. This is the soul of decadence—a rigid subservience to unchanging rules and patterns so that nothing new or soul-expanding will ever be allowed to happen.

This is what Gardner did to himself and what he would have imposed upon others. The Gardner religion was not any kind of liberation; it was a reactionary return to the unchanging rigidity of the Roman Catholic mass. The evidence suggests that Gardner never deviated from his theatrics once he had perfected them. And where were wise women and their herbs in all of this? Weren't they supposed to be the real witches? Not in the Gardner religion. Forget herbs and gardens and the stars . . . what mattered to Gardner and his followers was ritual, and nothing else but. In Sylvia Townsend-Warner's 1926 novel Lolly Willowes, the only thing that happens to the witch heroine when she arrives at her first Sabbath is . . . dancing. No script, no show, no ceremony, no ritual. Just a bunch of people dancing, plus one intriguing conversation with none other than Satan himself. This was how people envisioned witches' Sabbaths until Gardner came along with his ceremonies.

In recent years evidence has surfaced explaining why Gardner was so obsessed with theatrics, namely that he was on a quest for upwardness. Only it wasn't my kind of broomstick upwardness, it was a type of guy upwardness, and Gardner needed a ceremonial ritual in order to achieve it. Apparently a lot of Brit guys in those days needed some kind of ceremony to get themselves into this state of upwardness, thanks to the sadistic disciplinary methods of the Victorian public school system. Most of them probably got the missus or a hooker to perform the necessary chastisement, but this wasn't good enough for Gardner. Better turn yourself into a pumpum and surround yourself with a bunch of eager converts willing to do the spanking. Then stir it up in a cauldron and call it witchcraft. If this isn't utter genius, I don't know what is.

So the Gardner religion commenced. It was quite specifically a lordship/serf religious movement right from the beginning, with the pumpum in charge calling the shots. Which meant, naturally enough, that quarrels between Gardner and his followers commenced almost immediately, with plenty of acrimony and dissension throughout the 1950s. Some of Gardner's followers, most notably the author Doreen Valiente, reached a point where they could not take his high-handedness any longer and established their own groups. But they kept practicing what Gardner had concocted, up to and including the theatrics, and they continued to call it witchcraft, which got it noticed. From a miniscule movement in the 1940s it grew and developed with ever increasing interest—and converts—as the years went on.

The history of the movement in the 1960s and 1970s is mostly a tale of a new generation of pumpum manipulators who appropriated the W word and found profitable ways of making a living out of it. Practically anybody calling themselves a witch in those days managed to get themselves noticed, interviewed, and published. Some of them, believe it or not, come across as reasonably decent people who quite honestly believed the hokum that Gardner had concocted. But like all True Believers they were too brain dead to question any of his premises, especially the idea that the theatrics were essential. Ritual, ritual, ritual. Come together to do a ritual, and then do it for the rest of your life. The essential core of the Gardner religion.

What happened next, predictably, is that the Gardner religion came to America. That is another story. Specifically it is a saga of the Goddess that failed.

Yawn,

Mona

* * *

March 1

The Goddess that failed. Yes, my dear Janet—I suppose that this is a glib way to put it, but it sums up what happened when the Gardner religion crossed the pond. I write these words reluctantly, since the whole idea of a revivified pagan religion was a golden opportunity for a breath of fresh air in American culture. Gardner's idea of native British paganism was the first spiritual system to come along which was free of the ossified traditions of both East and West. No lifeless dogma or outmoded creeds or revealed truths from the Angel Macaroon here. Gardner's religion had the potential to be the first truly liberating spiritual path since the ancient Greeks had declared their independence from the tyranny of their priests. However, everyone involved blew it completely.

Since there was no doubt about the legitimacy of the Gardiner religion in the muddled minds of its first American practitioners, they were determined to follow him to the letter, ein, swei, drei, never wavering from his official dictates, so mote it be. The movement remained marginal for many years, existing mostly in New York and California, although its practitioners did their tidy best to promote it any way they could. I cannot remember anyone mentioning Neo-Paganism or witchcraft when I was growing up in the Bible Belt, but I do have a vague memory of watching a woman named Sybil Leek on a 1960s talk show. She was a hefty British lady who had a jackdaw perched on her shoulder and was pleased to inform the audience that she was a "white witch." A what?

At any rate, something happened after the first American Gardnerians began appearing in the early Sixties, namely the Seventies. That's when those of us who had had it with mainstream Christianity but who didn't see much value in prostrating themselves before an imported guru with a bank account discovered witchcraft. Why, here was something that might work! Native European spirituality! A religious tradition free of dogma and scripture! No more institutionalized spirituality! No more hectoring from the pulpit! No more meditation cushion! Now I can turn myself into a witch! I can start practicing the religion of my remote Celtic ancestors! I've even got a good reason to wear a kilt!

So plenty of Sixties and Seventies types started turning into witches, or at least into Neo-Pagans. Groups sprang up all over the country. Underground newsletters were published. Then came the Neo-Pagan Moment of Destiny, a.k.a. October of 1979, when two groundbreaking Neo-Pagan books were published on the same day. The first was Drawing Down the Moon by Margot Adler. Adler was a professional journalist for National Public Radio, and her book contained the first detailed descriptions of the new Neo-Pagan religions that had developed in the United States and Britain during the Seventies. The interesting thing about this book is that while the author lovingly describes all the various Neo-Pagan groups she has encountered, she does not hesitate to illustrate the con artist scams she's also run into. All of which, of course, are conveniently rationalized away in the best tradition of Christian Fundies ignoring the scriptures they don't like. Adler even quotes one prominent Neo-Pagan who acknowledges that the new religion is based upon any kind of historical source "that doesn't run away too fast".[26] In a way Drawing Down the Moon was a very funny book—if only I'd realized it at the time.

The second book was The Spiral Dance, by Miriam Simos, who writes under the pseudonym of Starhawk. That's right—Starhawk. Here I must confess that I have a problem. You must understand that I happen to be in favor of birds. I adore birds of all kinds, especially owls. But I happen to believe that all birds are created equal. This is my idea of a self-evident truth. I am not willing to distinguish between terrestrial birds, celestial birds, and astral birds, assuming that there is such a thing as an astral bird. Therefore, while I acknowledge that an aspiring author is entitled to use the pseudonym she chooses, the whole idea of an astral bird does not engender in me a sense of egalitarianism.

Starhawk's Spiral Dance was something more than an elaboration on the Gardner religion. This was yet again another brand new religion. It was an amalgamation of everything the author found valuable in Gardnerian witchcraft, plus something new, namely her own version of a divine concept: the Goddess. Forget Big Daddy in the Sky and his tantrums. In The Spiral Dance Starhawk is pleased to announce that the real deity, the deity that counts, is Big Momma in the earth. The Goddess was alive again! What Goddess? Why, the Great Mother, of course. That ancient gigantic female deity who was worshipped back in remote prehistory, in those good old days when you managed to survive until the age of thirty if you were lucky. Big Momma in the earth is the whole point of The Spiral Dance. Starhawk was giving us a brand new divine concept, but this time it was a female concept. This was an astounding idea for someone like me, with my protestant Christian background and my dislike of Buddhist nothingness. A deity who was female? One in whom I could actually believe? Amazing! Incredible! My goodness, a Goddess! Here was a vision of the universe without that elderly gentleman with the British accent sitting on a golden throne in the sky. I could look out at nature and find divinity. Big Momma lived! She was everywhere! A mighty fortress was our Goddess!

Well, maybe. It is true that mother goddesses were worshipped in most cultures at the beginning of human history. This was especially true in the period before agriculture when human societies existed at the mercy of natural forces. The earliest human artistic efforts were the female goddess figures created around 6,000 B.C., those tiny faceless statues with the bulging pregnant bellies. You needed charms like this when you feared you might starve to death next winter. But as cultures developed and people became more settled, they changed their religious focus from Big Momma in the earth to Big Daddy in the Sky. Not that this was an easy transition; the Book of Isaiah, for example, is filled with endless ranting about those idiot backsliders worshiping in the groves, and what they were doing in the groves was worshiping a female deity. The civilization of Minoan Crete was the last culture in the West to worship a mother goddess, but it was overthrown by invaders and did not rise again. Big Daddy in the Sky has been with us ever since. The whole notion of female divinity has been non-existent in Western culture since the advent of Christianity, unless you think that the sanitized and barely human figure of the Virgin Mary is some kind of divinity. The first Protestants got rid of her as fast as they eliminated the Latin Mass.

The Spiral Dance was the right book at the right time. It offered a way to get rid of that gigantic male humanoid whom Friedrich Nietzsche had pronounced dead in the late 19^th century. However, The Spiral Dance didn't eliminate divine concepts entirely. It just replaced a male concept with a female one. And its Mommy Goddess concept was nothing more than another product of mortal imagination, dredged up out of human desires and longings, and as unprovable as all the other divine concepts ever invented. But at least this new female divine concept happened to be very, very nice. Imagine that! A divine concept who was nice! No more thunderbolts from heaven, or hellfire and damnation, or revenge against the Philistines, or any other Big Daddy tantrums. The new Goddess was exactly like . . . mommy. She was gentle. She was soothing. She would kiss it and make it better. Never would she nag. Never would she demand to know when are you going to get married? She would be there whenever you needed her, and she would fetch a cool pillow for your drooping head. Oh, wonderful Mommy! Yummy Mommy! Take that, you rotten Big Daddy in the Sky! Mommy lives again!

Along with the Mommy concept came a utopian vision called the matriarchy. Now most religions have a fantasy of a lost golden age, barely located in historical time and space, where everything is sweetness and light and people live together in perfect harmony. The Garden of Eden, the Greek Arcadia . . . millions of people have an atavistic need for this kind of daydream, as much as they need to hang onto their version of a divine concept. Converts want their own fool's paradise much more than anyone else, and Goddess converts were no different. They invented a myth of a lost prehistoric culture, the great and glorious matriarchy, were there was no conflict, no violence, no warfare, and everything was sacred. A feminist version of Disneyland in other words, because the women were in charge. Mind you, this stuff was not as intellectually impressive as Sir Thomas More's Utopia or the 18th century's romanticized dreams about the wonders of Cathay, but it served its purpose. How pleasant it must have been way back then! We worshipped Mommy, we lived in harmony with nature, we romped on the lawn with the bunny rabbits, and we had plenty of great sex! Then those dirty rotten patriarchs came along and ruined everything.

Along with the matriarchy stuff came a very agreeable Heaven concept, which was dubbed Summerland. Now there is no evidence for the existence Summerland, just as there is no evidence for any kind of life after death, but die-hard Neo-Pagans tend to dwell upon the delights of Summerland as fervently as die-hard fundamentalists yearn for their heavenly high-rise. I cannot figure out who originally dreamed up Summerland, whether it was Gardner or one of his British followers, but Summerland, where the skies are not cloudy all day, is the perfect culmination of the Mommy religion. It seems to be some kind of feeble clone of the Greek Arcadia. No hellfire and damnation, no disagreeable Day of Judgment, no waiting for elevators in the mile-high city, just a land of summer for everybody. Whenever I think about it, which isn't often since I have better things to do with my time, I sometimes ask myself which of the Heaven concepts I find the most repellent: Dante's vision of eternal repetition, Thomas Aquinas' idea of paradise surrounded by stone battlements, Islam and those annoying seventy-two teen queens, or Summerland. Summerland wins hands down. The Neo-Pagan dream of Summerland is apparently some kind of clone of our very own Sunbelt suburbia, complete with gas grill and Coors, but mercifully free of gridlock, from here to eternity. Well, no, you don't have to endure it for all eternity, since reincarnation is also a core belief of contemporary Mommy believers. That means that we're coming back as fast as we can so we can get lots more great sex! Jeepers creepers. Give me Jonathan Edwards' burning lake of fire any day.

Such is the contemporary Mommy religion—a stagnant morass of touchy-feely wishful thinking appealing mostly to middle class suburbanites who have no direct knowledge of the brutality or the turbulence of nature. When your only experience of the outdoors consists of mowing the lawn, a Big Mommy can seem very much real. Everything repellant comes from the patriarchy, or maybe globalization, but never from us womyn, let alone Mother Nature. But we need to remember that throughout history, women who didn't have the comforts of American suburbia envisioned a very different divine concept. Most of the surviving records of the real mother goddesses indicate that these figures were as barbaric as they were nurturing, and they remained so right until the end of the Roman Empire. People in ancient cultures did not have a sentimental view of the brutality of Mother Nature. Their Mother Goddesses were destroyers as much as they were creators. The Hindu Goddess Kali is a typical pre-modern Mother Goddess. She is always shown with sword in hand, fanged teeth, blood drooling from her mouth, and a necklace of skulls around her throat. Her earrings are two human corpses. She laughs as she dances on the dead or tramples on the body of her husband. Now is this kind of Big Mommy concept you want in your Stratford Hills subdivision? Am I kidding? But Kali is the true reality of what Mother Nature means—death as well as life, destruction as well as creation, and the hideous amorality of natural forces. An honest symbol for the reality of Mother Nature is not the bunny rabbit on the lawn, but the tornado slamming into the grade school.

The Mommy goddess fantasy in a book like The Spiral Dance would have been unthinkable before the Second World War, when most Americans understood what it was like to be at the mercy of natural forces and economic hardship. If you had tried to tell somebody in those days that Mother Nature was really very nice, you would have been kicked out of town all the way to the Dust Bowl. A book like The Spiral Dance is possible only in post-war America, where entitlement rules suburbia and people suffer under the delusion that they lead secure lives. If you can't imagine what it's like to be hungry unless you're dieting, you have no business wallowing in a gigantic Mommy. Replacing a male humanoid with its female counterpart was not a step forward in human evolution, but a regression straight back to the nursery.

But even in the nursery, the theatrics have to happen. Starhawk was even more fixated on the idea of religious ritual than was old Gerald himself. The Spiral Dance offers up innumerable rules and regulations about the proper way to practice the Mommy religion. Not that the author ever states that her rules were rules, they are apparently supposed to be only suggestions. But rules they've proved to be: specifically very precise rules for the rituals that you have to perform, since everybody knows that rituals are what happen in religion. So if you want to be a good Neo-Pagan, you still have to make a magic circle (why?), you have to call in the four directions (we're still imitating medieval magicians?), and then you do your magical working (hadn't the hippies warned us about power trips back in the Sixties?). Once again, the theatrics are the centerpiece, since everybody knows when you've got a religion you have to do something. Follow the rules, or else! In the nursery Mommy must always be obeyed!

By now it should be obvious that this Mommy stuff did not constitute a spirituality for grown-ups. At least a grown-up like myself, who needed something more than bunnies, glitter, and great sex for spirituality. Rumor has it that there was also a strong political message in The Spiral Dance, mainly that it is not nice to pollute the environment, but in my own experience this tends to get lost in the folly. For folly has been the keynote of people attempting to put into practice what The Spiral Dance preaches. Do you want to know what kind of religion these peaceful Mommy worshippers have put together? Are you yearning to hear the song of hawk in the stars? It is the same music that emanated from Golden Dawn and then from Gardner's covens. It sounds likes this:

     Quarrel, quarrel, quarrel . . .
     Squabble, squabble, squabble . . .
     Kill, kill, kill . . .

Mona

* * *

March 8

That's right. In other words, endless quarrels, lethal infighting, constant arguments, exhausting wrangling . . . Such is the Neo-Pagan movement in America today. So exhausting are the constant and frequently absurd quarrels that modern Neo-Pagans could have taught a thing or two to the Catholics and Protestants who were slaughtering each other five centuries ago. I doubt that you can find a single Spiral Dance group anywhere in this country whose members are not constantly at each others throats. Newcomers to the movement are always astonished to discover the endless acrimony which exists among modern Neo-Pagans. No matter what the organization, what the group, everybody is always fighting everybody else. The Spiral Dance's idea of the ideal Neo-Pagan group, the coven, has been especially prone to relentless combat. Once upon a time I used to dream about joining a coven of sister witches, a group of truly supportive and spiritually evolved friends, with whom I could commune in perfect love and perfect trust. If something like this exists in the continent of North America, I've yet to find it.

Of course this perpetual quarrelling was not the intention of the author of The Spiral Dance when she published her book. On the contrary: Big Mommy was going to empower the world with thousands (millions?) of spiritually elite beings capable of leading benighted humanity into the light of a revived matriarchy. This in turn would bring about a fabulous new human consciousness and paradise on earth, with plenty of time for great sex. That was the dream, and a very congenial dream it was. But speaking as a bruised veteran of this fantasy Cloud Cuckoo Land, I can only say that I sure don't see anything remotely resembling it anywhere on earth. All I've ever seen in the Neo-Pagan movement are endless bickering, interminable disagreements, and constant infighting.

Of course, most die-hard Neo-Pagans know perfectly well who is causing the never-ending arguments, namely those other difficult personalities in the group, the ones who can just never learn. In other words, it's not me, it's not my friends, we're not doing anything wrong, the problem is—them. Whenever I hear of yet another squabbling Neo-Pagan group that has imploded into thin air, the survivors start pointing fingers at the other people, namely those rotten control freaks with whom they were trying to get along. They are the ones causing the problems, the sort of tyrants who are determined to impose their will upon their colleagues, and only for their own good. Now why do people like this keep turning up in religious movements? But—but—it wasn't us! We weren't out to control anybody! We are the good ones, the enlightened avatars of the future, which means that we're the ones whose words need to be obeyed! But trying to figure out who are the control freaks and who are the enlightened beings is like trying to figure out the difference between Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Out of the coven endlessly quarrelling.

Why are these quarrels constantly happening? Surely a group of people on a similar spiritual path would be able to come together in peace? It never occurs to any of Starhawk's followers that the problems go on and on and on . . . not in spite of, but because of, the pernicious precepts to be found in The Spiral Dance. The paradigm proposed in this book is guaranteed to generate dissention. As a matter of fact, it's probably the only thing that it will generate. And what is this paradigm? It can be summed up in one word—ritual. Here we are again, back to the obsession with theatrics. It is difficult for people practicing mainstream religions to comprehend the emphasis placed on ritual as a be-all and an end-all by contemporary Neo-Pagans. Not even Gerald Gardner himself was as obsessed with rituals as a modern American Neo-Pagan. If you open up any of the popular Neo-Pagan books that swamp the markets these days, what do you see? Rituals, rituals, rituals, page after page of rituals, rituals for every possible time and place, rituals for every moment of your existence, each one described in the most lethally boring detail, step by interminable step, and honey, you'd better follow it letter by the letter, or else. Once upon a time I thought that the Neo-Pagan spiritual path would lead me to one of my favorite words, liberation. Fat chance of that. Liberation, increasing your freedom, remaining open to the new . . . these are not visible concepts to modern Neo-Pagans. Not when the only thing that matters is the ritual.

But of course most religions have rituals, so what's wrong with that? Religious ceremonies have served a definite human need over the centuries. Going to some sort of formal ceremony on a regular basis is what religion means to most people. It also seems to be a universal belief that these ceremonies will make you better, or at least make your life better. In the modern world we tend to forget that the earliest religious rituals had nothing to do with personal improvement. They were a way to ward off divine wrath. The whole aim was propitiation. If you didn't sacrifice to Zeus, the crops would fail, the children would die, or the pirates would attack. People kept their mouths shut and let the pumpums do their stuff. But when the focus changed from propitiation to a more sophisticated goal, that of connecting with or apprehending the Divine, then the arguments started. What kind of ritual to perform frequently became the most prominent bone of contention in religious disputes. The great schism between Western and Orthodox Christianity in the 11th century was basically a quarrel over ritual, and after ten centuries it still hasn't healed. During the Reformation Protestants and Catholics quarreled about many things, but most ferociously about what should happen when good Christians came together. Mass or sermon, Latin or vernacular, whether or not Jesus was present in the bread . . . both sides believed in Jesus with their whole hearts, but what they were supposed to do during the ritual was one of the principal reasons why they started killing each other.

Christianity was big on rituals from the beginning; their churches were constructed for it. The earliest Christian churches were designed for an audience to sit or kneel in rows and focus their attention on the raised platform at the end of the room, where the show was taking place. This is otherwise known as watching a performance on a stage. If you were a good Catholic, the performance was always an unchanging ceremony, and so what if you couldn't understand the Latin, you just had to show up, pay attention, fork over indulgence money, and presto, Heaven was yours! Protestants got rid of the rote ceremonials, the Latin, and the indulgences, but they retained the stage. Then they started offering up a different kind of performance each week, one in which you were harangued in the vernacular until you turned into a good person. And you got to hear a different lecture every week! The pumpum in charge could be creative with his sermons—but only within limits, of course. After fifteen hundred years of a single repetitive ceremony, this must have been a huge novelty.

Gardner and his followers retained the Christian stage. The difference was its location. Instead of watching a spectacle at the end of the room, now you watched what was happening in the middle of a circle. Some Neo-Pagans are enormously proud of the fact that the audience watching their shows are sitting in an egalitarian circle instead of those hierarchical rows. Not only that—some of the spectators get to participate in the ceremony, too! All of which allegedly makes a Neo-Pagan ritual so vastly superior to a Christian service, so much more unpatriarchial. Well, not that I can see. The impulse is the same. Provide the faithful with some kind of theatrics, and . . . well, what? You make them spiritual? You get them to the Divine? If that is what is supposed to be happening, it tends to be as invisible as any divine concept you care to name.

Starhawk was as obsessed with ritual as much as was Gardner, but with a difference. Her enlightened Mommy worshippers did not want the same patterns repeated over and over again for the rest of eternity. Instead The Spiral Dance emphasized creativity. Forget about doing the same ritual year in and year out—hey, guys, let's be creative, let's think up something new each time. Now isn't this a fabulous idea! Goddess Neo-Pagans wouldn't imprison themselves in sameness—they would design a different ritual each and every time they come together! They would keep the idea of casting a circle and the hocus-pocus involved therein, but everything else was up for grabs. I guess there was logic here. Indeed, it should have been a way to revivify the whole idea of a religious observance. People could start devising their own ceremonials. They could be both creative and innovative—as long as they remained non-hierarchical, of course. But the whole idea was as wrong as it was humanly possible to be. It meant, basically, that a committee would design and act out the ritual. Now I have already mentioned that I am not too fond of committees. American reformer Elbert Hubbard once remarked, "A committee is a thing which takes a week to do what one good man can do in an hour",[27] which sums up committee efforts for me. And the idea of a committee making the decisions in a creative endeavor is an invitation to disaster.

Disaster has been the inevitable result whenever any committee, otherwise known as a coven, has tried to practice what The Spiral Dance preaches: namely that a small group of people should design a theatrical production every few weeks or so. This is the problem. A group of allegedly non-hierarchical types coming together to design, produce, and act out an amateur show is a ridiculous joke. Just stop for a moment and try to imagine a real Broadway play produced and directed by a committee. Or a painting created by a committee. Or a symphony written by a committee. Anything creative you care to name designed by a committee. The idea is ludicrous. You will never find two people who can completely agree about any kind of artistic endeavor. Devising a religious ritual requires as much creative imagination as writing a poem or carving a sculpture. If a group of people attempts to produce any kind of artistic work, there will inevitably be compromises—compromises arrived at by exhausting, hard-fought battles. And compromises are not the stuff of what is great and glorious in human achievement.

So here come the quarrels. Arguing about what we should do at the next ritual is the reality of the Neo-Pagan movement in this country today. Nobody agrees, and nobody will ever agree. Spiral Dance Neo-Pagans are swamped by quarrels, battered by quarrels, and can look forward to nothing except ever more quarrels. But converts are converts, and these exhausted True Believers know perfectly well that it's only those other difficult personalities who are creating the problems, not me, not my buddies, not the Goddess, and certainly not the rules and regulations found in The Spiral Dance. We will happily join together as soon as those obnoxious bitches take their leave, and from then on we will design perfectly marvelous shows. For the shows must go on.

Well, if you ask me, life is too short, and this ain't worth it. Especially if you start to ask exactly why followers of The Spiral Dance want to do their rituals. Gardner had a good reason for his rituals, remember, namely his own version of guy upwardness. But The Spiral Dance rituals are supposed to accomplish something more substantial. This is when it gets funny.

Mona

P.S. "Ducdame ducdame ducdame," sings Jacques in As You Like It.[28] "'Tis a Greek invocation to call fools into a circle."

* * *

March 12

So what can be funny about the aim of a religious ritual? Can't you guess?

Spiral Dance Neo-Paganism was a religion that was dreamed up in the 1970s, that most dismal of American decades, when everybody discovered that they were a victim. Nobody was accomplishing anything way back then, you see, since we had all been so terribly wounded that we were all feeling our pain. And we were running off to the nearest shrink, preferably the ones who got paid for dispensing advice on TV talk shows, in order to start feeling better. And what exactly were the shrinks dishing out? Yes, you guessed it! The shrinks were dishing out therapy! In the Seventies therapy was the only human palliative that mattered. It was what everyone was desperate for, since we all knew that the right kind of therapy would solve every single one of our problems.

A delusion which is still very much with us. We can't survive without our therapy, right? Well, of course we can't, contemporary American reality being so utterly intolerable to uncounted millions these days. Why there is such a lust for therapy in our culture I cannot say. You would think that with reasonable economic security and numerous other perks that our grandparents could not have imagined, most people would be blissfully happy. Not a chance. We Americans have got to have our therapy. And if we can't get it from the shrinks, or from that mountain of self-help books clogging Barnes and Noble, then naturally our pumpums are going to dish it out to us. It's what they are paid to do these days, anyway. Nowadays we hear that Catholic priests are trained in social work and psychology instead of theology, and mainline Protestant ministers spend a good percentage of their days in weepy hand-holding. Therapy is what the faithful want, and therapy is what they get.

But herein lies a problem. Therapy is a psychological experience, and psychology and spirituality happen to be two different things. You make a mistake when you confuse them. Therapy isn't a way to find Divinity or understand the most important questions about human existence. Countless human souls have yearned for answers about life, death, suffering, mutability, and the vastness of time and space since the dawn of human history—but not when they're being analyzed by their shrinks. You are never going to get any kind of mystical revelation or transcendent vision from therapy. You are just going to get caught up in what are frequently the most banal aspects of human existence, the kind of soap opera messes which Zen tells us to let go of. But since contemporary Neo-Pagans are as fixated on therapy as is everyone else these days, therapy is what you're going to get when you go to a Neo-Pagan ritual. Mind you, it's matriarchal therapy, not that slimy Freudian stuff, which makes it okay. Oh, thank Goddess! Our heads are finally going to get fixed! This time we won't have to shell out our hard-earned cash to that ignoramus with the M.A. in psychology, or swallow those crappy anti-depressants which so totally screw up the colon, all we need to do is head off to the nearest Neo-Pagan gathering, where we will be healed and empowered. How lucky can you get?

So for years now thousands of true-believing Neo-Pagans have done their tidy best to turn themselves into amateur shrinks. Just what the world needs: amateur shrinks. When the success rate of professional shrinks is hardly better than dismal, it is a mystery to me why anyone would think that amateur shrinks might be more successful. But when Neo-Pagans come together they have to do something, since everyone knows that doing is what happens in religion, so why shouldn't they dispense some therapy? And so what if they're amateurs? At least they're ecological or maybe non-patriarchal amateurs. Amateur non-patriarchal shrinks arguing about a committee-designed theatrical performance for the purposes of victimhood therapy . . . this is the reality of the Neo-Pagan movement in the United States today.

But what happens if you don't think you're a victim? One of my eccentric peculiarities is that I actually think I am responsible for the circumstances of my life. So why isn't the patriarchy picking on me the way it picks on everyone else? Where are the horrible wounds I'm supposed to have? Why do I only see faults or damaging habits that I myself need to deal with? The Spiral Dance assumption, so utterly Seventies, is that everybody is a victim whether they realize it or not. If you don't, does that mean you're colluding with the patriarchy? Can it be possible that I'm a dysfunctional victim the way I'm a dysfunctional witch?

It will be noticed, at least by Buddhists, is that Spiral Dance rituals are generating spiritual materialism of the most egregiously lethal sort. Spiritual materialism? A concept which is incomprehensible not only to modern Neo-Pagans, but to the mainstream professional shrinks upon which they model themselves. Psychological betterment is, of course, the whole goal of Western psychiatry, where the human ego is regarded as prime real estate to be developed, so up and up it goes until it's the size of Mt. McKinley, at which point the patient will presumably find happiness (without the Prozac). Just some state-of-the-art psychobabble from your shrink is all it takes. Maybe with some people this stuff actually works, the way sermons seem to work some of the time. But what happens more frequently is the kind of spiritual or psychological vanity which takes possession of self-absorbed people who are immensely proud of their progress towards the light and who never miss a chance to brag about their magnificent spiritual development. I once had a co-worker inform me that her spiritual level was this high, and she lifted her hand above her head so I wouldn't miss the point. Well, I got the point all right. Vanity used to be one of the seven deadly sins, but not when all the therapy you've been absorbing deludes you into thinking that you've turned into a spiritual aristocrat. Must be nice.

Here I must emphasize that I have always been a great believer in self-improvement. But Zen has taught me the necessity of relinquishing the whole idea of building up your ego. If you are the sort of person who tells yourself that every day, in every way, you are getting better and better, chances are that all you are getting is worse. You are turning yourself into a spiritual materialist of the most gruesomely poisonous sort. Christian Fundies or Spiral Dance Neo-Pagans . . . these are egos you don't want to be around. Not that any of these good True Believers would admit to any of this. Especially those Neo-Pagan True Believers who are out to reform the world. Or at least reform those reactionary patriarchal types with the irksome personality quirks, no problem, we will eventually be able to modify their behavior, we will raise their consciousness, we will make them love Big Mommy, all we have to do is stage ritual, act shaman, and tap on drum. How wonderful it is to be a Neo-Pagan! And so what if it seems so easy? Who needs self-discipline or challenge? This way us amateur shrinks will gladly do the work for you, and you just sit back to let it happen. We're going to win your battle for you before the shots are even fired. Religion can't get any better than this. Just stick your metaphysical yearnings into the microwave, and they'll get real hot real fast.

Even if the resultant meal might not be all that nourishing. Since everything in the Neo-Pagan universe is fixable, everything remains safe. There is never any kind of challenge in these snug little rituals. You can also forget about using your powers of reason and logic, which are so utterly patriarchal anyway. Better to remain in the irrational world of trance and altered states of consciousness, where everything is nurturing and intuitive. Just start thinking with your uteruses, girls, forget your head, who needs intellectual rigor now that the world is turning matriarchal? And forget about everything dark, dangerous, or disturbing within you. Sure we know that human beings are saddled with biological drives for sex and survival, but it's only those patriarchal types with the wrong religion who need to come to terms with their destructive urges. But not us, that great sex we keep getting makes us immune to that kind of thing. The fact that we're always fighting tooth and nail with each other is only temporary. Healing is what matters. Never forget that the goal of our Neo-Pagan wonderfulness is not mystical vision but therapy. This means we can forget nuisances like the inevitability of death, the vanity of human desires, the reality of loss and change in our lives, or even the Dark Night of the Soul. Sure we know that plenty of mystics have written about the value of the Dark Night of the Soul, one of the most arduous and difficult experiences that a human being can undergo, but that sort of obnoxious stuff isn't necessary on our peaceful and ecological spiritual path, where you never have to confront the darkness within you since you don't have any in the first place.

By this point you're probably wondering if human behavior can get any sillier. You bet it can. And that is another story.

Exhaustedly,

Mona

* * *

March 20

All right, so my favorite niece doesn't want to hear anything more about the Neo-Pagan idiocy that I've experienced over the years. You tell me that you have better things to do with your life, including cleaning out the refrigerator. Sorry, sweetie. You've got to hear one more tirade before I'm through. And this is one that you need to pay attention to. We are now going to take a look at how contemporary Neo-Pagans envision the matriarchal future to come, that glorious utopia which is floating out there on the horizon like a gigantic sack of Halloween candy. This new world is described in Starhawk's fourth book (and first novel) entitled The Fifth Sacred Thing.

Janet, it is time for you to brace yourself.

The Fifth Sacred Thing depicts a Northern California matriarchal society in the middle of the 21^st century. This is a culture premised on values of healing, empowerment, equality, and intuition. Nobody is shoving anyone around. Centralized authority is a thing of the past. No more pollution—automobiles have been eliminated. People are growing vegetables in their back yards. Decisions are made collectively and quite happily. Multiculturalism floats serenely over everything. Contented Mommy worshippers occupy themselves in doing pleasant things for everybody's own good, especially psychic stuff like telepathy, dream work, and sweet little magic spells. The central character is a ninety-eight-year-old Sixties relic named Maya, who is a sprightly elderly lady with both faculties and political correctness intact. It is Maya's matriarchal writings have inspired this placid, if hugely underwhelming, utopia.

But, oh my Gawdess! Wait a minute! The matriarchy hasn't completely triumphed, at least not everywhere! This fabulous utopian society is just a San Francisco holdout against a Vast Fundamentalist Conspiracy which is literally everyplace else! These peaceful matriarchs in the Bay Area haven't really conquered the entire earth, only a small part of it! The rest of the North American continent is suffering under the rule of a totalitarian police state. We quickly discover that the real power is in the hands of the Christian Fundies, who are headquartered in the freeways of Southern California. These are a bunch of rotten, nasty, apartheid types, who keep their women barefoot and pregnant, despoil the environment, drive automobiles, and don't eat vegetables. Also they are such rotten bad guys that they are determined to destroy the Mommy worshippers in the northern part of the state.

So here is the plot. The bad guys are out to destroy the good guys. A decidedly novel idea for a novel—I wonder why no one has ever thought of this before. Well, come to think of it, somebody has: consider the adventures of Moose and Squirrel. But I think that even Moose and Squirrel would cringe at the melodramatic plot developments of The Fifth Sacred Thing. The novel alternates between a series of great sex scenes for the good guys, contrasted with endless displays of the Fundie bad guys torturing the saints. Chapter after chapter, page after page, all you get is the great sex, an awful lot of it, and then during the great sex lacunae the bad guys reappear and start tormenting our heroes. Sex and torture, sex and torture . . . I guess this is what happens if you live the dynamics of The Spiral Dance or maybe de Sade's Philosophy in the Bedroom. Luckily, however, everything is always okay. No matter what the pickle, the good guys manage to extricate themselves from the bad guys in The Nick of Time. No real damage is ever done, and the great sex invariably resumes with scarcely a missed blip. Curses, foiled again!

Is this a plot? It is if you're writing hagiography. Once upon a time, back in the wonderful Middle Ages, the only books worth reading in the old monastery on a dull winter night were the lives of the saints. In those days Christians didn't get to be saints without horrendous suffering, agonizing torments, and exquisitely interminable expirations. Both writers and readers enjoyed dwelling on the valiant ability of the faithful to hang on to the True Religion despite their ghastly sufferings. This was very inspirational reading for certain types of backsliding minds, the kind who need to dwell on descriptions of human agony. The more detailed and explicit the suffering, of course, the better for everyone. This was the whole point—a delightful little masochistic frisson. Life is much less dull when these frissons abound.

Both Catholic and Protestant Christians have contributed to the grand old frisson tradition for many centuries now. The most famous Protestant example is Fox's Book of Martyrs, one of the most popular books in Puritan New England where it was read to pieces, since frissons were as hard to come by in 17^th century Massachusetts as they were in Medieval Europe. Modern hagiography tends to the political. The early Soviets were fond of publishing biographies and erecting statues to their Marxist-Leninist martyrs, just as long as they suffered horribly when they died, and the Chinese, North Koreans and Cubans have predictably followed suit. Hagiography is the ultimate in didactic simplicity—what you always get are the ghastly sufferings of the saints vs. the unspeakable wickedness of the nasties. The saints are always 100% saintly, while the nasties are always 100% nasty. The saints are so inspired by their particular belief system that they always possess enormous courage and fortitude, while the nasties lack even a single redeeming quality. There are never any shades of gray: you would never expect a saint to possess even the slightest flaw. Let us not forget that they are the ones in possession of the One True Religion, which the nasties are out to destroy since they don't have anything better to do. Hiss the villain! Hiss! Hiss!

Hagiography is not my idea of fascinating reading. Saints are not all that interesting; if you want to define the word boring, this would be a good place to start. The good guys in The Fifth Sacred Thing are as whopping as saints can get. What we see in every last one of them is the absolute ultimate in human nobility, heroism, and strength. They start out as saints, they act saintly throughout the whole book, and they finish as saints. Forget about character development—when you're a saint there's no reason for growth or change since you're already perfect. At one point people leave votive candles on the doorstep of the younger heroine thanks to some horrible suffering she's recently endured. And she hasn't even been martyred yet! Talk about the crème de la crème of saints!

Grandma Maya is the saintliest of them all. She talks saintly, thinks saintly, lives in a saintly house, eats saintly food, and writes saintly books. Well, that is to say she has written saintly books. We don't see her writing, not at the age of ninety-eight. No, what we predictably see her do is having great sex. At one point she discovers that she has an admirer, a man in his seventies, and into the sack they immediately jump. The author stresses several times that Maya's admirer is twenty years her junior, because—let's face it—great sex with a guy in his nineties is not that likely, but if he's still in his seventies . . . well, maybe. So the great sex gets to happen not just with the younger characters, but also with Maya. Of course, the author doesn't give us the clinical details of a ninety-eight year old woman actually doing it; she seems dimly aware that this might prove to be a bit much even for her most devoted fans. This makes perfect sense. Novels have to be marketable. But we are definitely made to understand that Maya's sex is really, really great.

What is so creepy about all this is the utter banality of the matriarchal vision. Whenever the saints get a breather from the torture, the only thing they do is sit around and have great sex. This is the only human activity which is emphasized in the book. Our heroes don't paint pictures, throw pots, embroider silk, write poetry, knit sweaters, carve wood, discuss philosophy, visit museums, ponder metaphysics, design clothes, compose symphonies, bake bread, play glockenspiels, cure cancer, fly broomsticks, or attempt any kind of Promethean quest. They don't even quarrel about the next ritual! They just have great sex. Wonderfully great sex, fabulously great sex, delightfully great sex, ad infinitum great sex, all presented with the delicate subtlety of a Sherman tank. Apparently this is what we're in for once the matriarchy replaces the patriarchy. I can hardly wait.

It is interesting to note that a book like The Fifth Sacred Thing is not an anomaly these days. We are inundated by religious fiction from many quarters in our post-modern world. These books seem to sell pretty well, although you don't find them on the best seller lists. L. Ron Hubbard, the Scientology pumpum, considered himself primarily a fiction writer, if you want to call his twisted tripe fiction. Rumor has it that Saddam Hussein also wrote fiction, and you can bet your sweet mosque that Christians don't come off very well in his oeuvre. Even the Fundies are at it. A few months ago at a garage sale I came across a novel entitled The End of the Age by prominent TV Christian Pat Robertson. I glanced through the book and found myself reading an account of the President of the United States of America deliberately blowing his brains out on live national television. My goodness—must have been a Democrat. Was there any reason for his somewhat theatrical suicide? Apparently a vile little asteroid is about to slam into planet earth and destroy Southern California. This is exactly what happens next, a ghastly collision which instantaneously annihilates millions of people. Comments one of the characters: "This is getting pretty heavy." Says another a few pages later: "A day like this can sure make a guy stop and think".[29]

Now here was a novel for the ages! I'm certain that Tolstoy and Balzac would have chewed nails wishing they could produce such fictional intensity, not to mention the kind of bravura dialogue which Shakespeare would have envied. Since the book was selling for thirty-five cents, I couldn't resist making a purchase. The End of the Age proved to be so fascinating that I read it in a single evening. There is a lot more to the book than one nuisance asteroid—Robertson also presents us with several repellent New Age/Neo-Pagan types who take over the federal government and proceed to make an odious pickle for good Christian Americans. In other words, Robertson has a very novel idea for a novel—the bad guys are out to destroy the good guys. I wonder why no one has ever thought of this before, but of course they have, consider the adventures of Moose and Squirrel. But I think that even Moose and Squirrel would cringe at the melodramatic plot developments of The End of the Age, which alternates between a series of great good guy prayer scenes contrasted with scenes of the Neo-Pagan bad guys going after the Fundie saints—

Wait a minute. It occurs to me that I am repeating myself. Is that possible? Am I saying that there are similarities between The End of the Age and The Fifth Sacred Thing? Given the fact that Pat Robertson and Starhawk would regard each other as the source of all evil upon earth, how can I claim that they've produced nearly identical books? Well, this is exactly what has happened. The End of the Age and The Fifth Sacred Thing are exact clones of each other. In both these books the saintly good guys must prevail against the wicked bad guys in order that the True Religion will triumph. The saints in each of the books are relentlessly saintly, while the nasties are relentlessly nasty. Not surprisingly, the plots of both books lurch from one melodramatic nick-of-time mess to another. At the end, of course, the respective True Religion triumphs and for the benefit of all True Believers! Never mind that it's two different True Religions doing the triumphing—the followers of one pumpum aren't going to read the fiction of the other. Besides, it would be a waste of time reading both these books—if you've read one, you've read 'em both. Their respective authors possess an absolutely unrelenting similarity of vision.

Now here is an interesting question: why are our two authors giving us good guy vs. bad guy plots? Why wasn't it enough for them to describe their vision of a True-Believing utopia? Why do they have to direct a limitless amount of venom towards enemies whom they consider to be subhuman? Plus provide us with page after page of the horror and devastation which the subhumans engender? I'm sure that our two authors aren't really secret sadists, they didn't want to write scenes of torture, terror, and destruction, they had to force themselves to do it. But what kind of human being wants to provide the faithful with endless scenes of horror? Is it . . . can it be possible . . . they do it only for their own good? Well, for once I think there's a different answer. Our two authors need to dehumanize one particular human group in order to portray the glorious virtues of their angelic characters. When we see the superior beings resisting the horrible cruelties of the bad guys, what better way is there to insure the triumph of a belief system? Give the faithful some role models! Hit them over the head with the fact that the greatest human virtues will be theirs for the asking—as long as they stick to the True Religion! As an added fillip, make sure that they know that nothing less than torture and death await them if they are not true to the faith! Listen to what I'm saying, you stupid idiot, or you're going to regret it! The Buddhist idea that no one is saved until everyone is saved would cut no ice in these fictional worlds.

One can only wonder what kind of mind thinks that their followers need to be edified by this kind of stuff. A human being with completely suffocated mind, that's who. What we have in Robertson and Starhawk are psychological doubles. They possess identical kinds of shallow mental energy, the kind which imprisons them in a totalitarian ideology and which can only be propped up by dishonesty and myopia. In other words, they are both true blue Manicheans, who will forever interpret the world in terms of us vs. them, good vs. evil, we're the good guys and they're the bad. And the bad guys are so bad that they are literally subhuman.

But of course Starhawk and Robertson aren't the only Manicheans around these days. Everywhere you turn in our post-modern world, you can find millions upon millions of second-rate minds desperately needing to cling to some kind of dualistic worldview, where we're the good guys and they're the bad. Manicheanism, after all, has a great attraction—it makes the world psychologically manageable. Forget about having to figure out complicated human behavior, Manicheanism allows you to move into a fabulous comfort zone where there are no more doubts, no uncertainties, no shades of gray, no ambiguities, nothing more to learn, and assuming you turn Neo-Pagan, there is now plenty of time for great sex. You have got everything finally figured out. The people you meet are no longer an undecipherable mixture of good and evil; they are either wholly good or wholly bad. Our belief system is the right one—theirs is the wrong one. And there's no point in asking us how we know this—why, we know it for sure. Heck, it happens to be real hard work trying to figure out human complexity! Robertson and Starhawk don't even try. The novels that they have produced indicate that they will forever remain two rigid, humorless, self-righteous personalities who possess an unshakable belief in their own supreme rectitude, not to mention a ferocious determination to make their own view of reality prevail.

Well, I've got news for them both: people who see the world in Manichean terms happen to be dangerous—remember Torquemada? Or a pathetic clown like Herr Schickelgruber? Scratch a Manichaean, and you find a fascist. German Nazism was as much a religious belief system as was Christianity, and it produced just as many fanatical True Believers. One thing contemporary Neo-Pagans never seem to notice are the parallels between Nazi Aryan beliefs and the current Neo-Pagan movement. German Nazism was originally supposed to be a return to the mystical glory of pre-Christian paganism. Its leaders emphasized interaction with nature, vegetarianism, organic foods, magical powers, and sun-worship. None other than Aleister Crowley claimed to have rediscovered the symbol of the swastika, which the Germans eventually appropriated. Does any of this sound familiar? It should, to anyone currently treading the contemporary Neo-Pagan path.

The core of Nazi belief was in the utter supremacy of one particular human group—the good old Aryan race, the only human group on the planet which possessed the good, the true, and the beautiful. But naturally these highly superior types needed an enemy as much as Robertson or Starhawk, and they found it in what they termed "World Jewry". World Jewry was the reason why everything was wrong. World Jewry was preventing the superior beings from achieving both secular and spiritual triumph. The good Germans who supported Hitler did so because he started delivering plenty of wonderful spiritual vibes which Christianity was no longer producing. No wonder millions upon millions of Germans eventually proved willing to sacrifice everything for the Aryan paradise. It was out there glimmering on the horizon like the matriarchy, or the Fundie high rise, or maybe even the big rock candy mountain. And all they needed to get it going was a tiny bit of Lebensraum. In The Spiral Dance Starhawk is aware that some people are reluctant to dabble in magic or Neo-Paganism because they are uncomfortable with the parallels with Nazi Germany. She states: "To equate Witches with Nazis because neither are Judeo-Christians and both share magical elements is like saying that swans are really scorpions because neither are horses and both have tails".[30] Well, all right, maybe, but if you ask me a Manichean swan and a Manichaean scorpion have quite a lot in common. I tend to think that all the moaning and groaning that contemporary Neo-Pagans do about the dirty rotten patriarchy conjures up memories of an earlier group of Neo-Pagans who carried on in a similar fashion about World Jewry and Zionist Protocols. The messes in my life aren't my fault! That deep, dark, evil, organized SOMETHING out there is causing my problems! I'm not responsible! I'm doing everything right!

We like to believe that fascism was then, and this is now, and it can't happen here. Or can it? Books like The Fifth Sacred Thing and The End of the Age make me wonder. Here we have two prominent American spiritual leaders who have produced books which completely dehumanize one particular human group. The bad guys in these respective books are obscene beyond belief: they are torturers and ruthless killers without any redeeming qualities whatsoever. Didn't the authors pause even for a moment to consider what they were doing when they decided to portray certain people as less than human? What did they think they were accomplishing? The glorious triumph of the faith? Did they not see the danger that someday, somewhere, some good little future fanatic might take it on himself to liquidate those rotten bad guys? The True Believers who read this stuff don't seem to be disturbed by such a possibility. Why is it only me who sees a similarity between these two pathetic novels and another famous book, written by a German, which also dehumanized another human group, namely the Jews? The fact that this similarity has been invisible to virtually all readers of the above two books is not an encouraging sign to me.

I just wish Robertson and Starhawk would have the kind of experience I had several years ago. I found myself reading about a man who seemed to be my exact double in every way. He had been raised as a Christian but as an adult he started to practice what he thought was the religion of his pagan ancestors. When his country went to war during his youth, he supported the war effort but did not make the mistake of dehumanizing the enemy—he was clear-sighted enough to regard enemy soldiers as human beings. He was a great art connoisseur who especially loved French Impressionism, and he wrote both poetry and short stories. He vastly preferred the elemental and the organic to the modern and the artificial, and he possessed a mystical reverence for the sacredness of the soil. He had zero interest in earning or spending money, he ate and drank in moderation, and when speaking with foreign visitors (such as earnest-minded American pacifists), he came across as a crusader for decency and justice. He was interested in non-Western forms of spirituality and particularly appreciated the Bhagavad-Gita, which he enjoyed quoting. He was curious enough about the world to be interested in oddball subjects such as astrology and graphology, although he also considered himself an idealistic man of science. His wife was a practicing homeopath. Most intriguing of all: he was particularly fascinated by herbs. This is the kicker. The man was a fellow herbalist. He was as interested as I am myself with the mysteries and the potencies of these special plants. Which meant that he went ahead and established herb gardens right in the middle of his camps. Concentration camps, that is, as in Buchenwald, Dachau, and Auschwitz. The man I am talking about is Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler, head of the Waffen SS. Also known as the Gestapo.

Whoops.

Me and Heinrich Himmler? Here I was, plain, ordinary, overworked, underpaid Mona Wilcox, discovering that the head of the Nazi SS, one of the most brutal and vicious killers who ever existed, was in many ways my psychic and intellectual double. This was a memorable moment in my life, and it set off a considerable amount of brooding. What kind of self-awareness did I have, what kind of a life was I leading, if so many of my interests were so similar to a man like Heinrich Himmler? More importantly—what kind of a belief system I was cobbling together for myself? Was it possible that I was heading straight into the kind of true believing fanaticism that I had seen in others over the years? Would I someday be capable of shoving the kiddies into the gas chamber without a second thought?

Well, at least I was asking myself these questions, which I've never seen a True Believer do. And I remembered that there was one vast difference between me and good old Heinrich, namely that I was never going to allow myself to dwell in absolute certitude about anything—not politics, gender, society, or a religious belief system. Most people seem to think that a profound and uncritical religious faith is something positive. Indeed, devout faith is a value which is almost universally approved of in all cultures. Faith can move mountains, after all. Well yes, but faith can also slam airliners into skyscrapers, erect concentration camps, burn people alive, and slaughter thousands in the name of an invisible deity. Those people who are utterly submerged in their faith would vehemently deny that they do any of these things, they use their faith only for good, and maybe they do, but they need to remember that it is faith and not reason which has created the greatest atrocities in human history.

Janet, I'm sure you haven't forgotten that freedom is my ultimate value. This is, remember, the whole point of flying on a broomstick—spiritual freedom, the best kind of freedom. I used to think that substance abusers were the most enslaved people you could find. If you have ever had to struggle with an addiction, you know that sooner or later the substance takes over your whole life, and the person you used to be isn't there any longer. It's the substance that does the talking, the thinking, and the living, and the living finally comes down to one thing only—getting the next fix. Here at the millennium millions of people are living out their lives as slaves to a substance. Can anything be worse than that? You bet there can, namely the slave mentality of the True-Believing fanatic. Sooner or later most addicts realize that their lives are out of control, and they start taking steps to escape the prison that their substance has created. But the True-Believer never sees the bars at the window. There is no more impregnable prison than the one which you have voluntarily built for yourself. "It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere," says Voltaire.[31] The suffocated mind of a True Believer will never even try. Not that any True Believer will admit to voluntary incarceration, since that would make them fallible, and fallibility is what happens to the other guys, the ones who don't have the correct political or spiritual beliefs. But incarcerated they most definitely are, and by their own deliberate choice.

Well, that won't to work for me, nor will it work for you, my dear Janet, not if you have any sense. You will be much better off as a free-thinker who will never allow yourself to be boxed in by anything, up to and including a sense of your own infallibility. This is the essential element in a humane world view. Once Heinrich Himmler turned into a true-believing Nazi, and the evidence suggests that he became as fanatical as a fanatic can get, he was capable of any crime, any atrocity, any outrage. Like all True Believers he locked himself into a vision of the world whose evidence-free premises he never doubted, and the horrors of the Second World War were the result. But if he had managed to leave himself open to new ideas or to contrary opinions, things might have been different. The obvious conclusion here is that there is always a necessity for skepticism, self-awareness, and self-criticism for anyone pursuing a new form of spirituality. Keeping yourself open to new facts or experiences is not a sign of weakness but evidence of a good critical ability at work. So maybe there's hope for me yet. Unfortunately I cannot say the same thing about Robertson and Starhawk, not unless they start working on it. They need to be reminded of the political lessons of the 20^th century, especially exactly how barbarous "civilized" humans can be. Nobody should commit to any kind of spiritual or political path these days without first reading Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, George Orwell, and Eric Hoffer. Plus good histories of the Catholic Inquisition and the Third Reich. But who am I kidding? What are the chances of that?

At any rate, this does explain why Robertson's and Starhawk's books are so terrible. Fanatics do not create great art. Their fiction is as humorless and as lifeless as an IRS booklet. Should they try to create something visual, they end up producing only "socialist realism" or Nazi poster propaganda. Not the sort of dreck that you, my dear Janet, would want to create. This brings me back to the idea of creativity. Great artists, musicians, and poets are never going to waste their time bothering about Manichean dualities, let alone seeking out subhuman enemies. A genuine artistic sensibility will want one thing only: namely to experience the world as intensely as possible and then communicate the experience through color or words or music. Consider Claude Monet, the quintessential impressionist painter. Monet was one of the most spiritually independent artists who has ever lived. He was too busy encountering water lilies, trees, flowers, sea, mist, wind, and waves to pay the slightest attention to any kind of enemy. He was also constantly aware of the shimmering light around him, especially the effects of the sun or the momentary moods of the seasons. And he was able to transmute his perceptions into paintings that give off such a serene feeling of spaciousness, such intense alertness, and such exhilarating joyousness that merely to look at a Monet is to have a sense of rising, expansion, and—yes—spiritual liberation. You don't necessarily need a broomstick to get high. Monet can do it to you in five seconds flat. Any great artist can.

These are the sort of encounters that Martin Buber wrote about in his great book I and Thou. Buber's thesis was simple yet beautifully profound: he realized that human beings can exist only in dialogue or communion with others. His great insight was that there is no life without relationship. He concluded that in the beginning was the relationship. Not the Word, not the First Cause, not the Big Bang—just relationship. One entity relating to another. This makes perfect sense to me. Dialogue, encounter, fellowship between one Thou and an Other . . . this is the true reality of life, including what happens at the quantum level. Existence is a web of interconnection. Value only happens when you are honoring the Other as a fellow Thou, instead of a lifeless It. When you understand that each object you encounter, whether tree, cat, or human being, has infinite worth, you are finding the primal truth about life. The superior human being is not the Napoleonic hero towering over history, but the human being who can sense the interrelatedness of all things. I think that Buber's insights are some of the few philosophical concepts from the last dismal century which are worth preserving. Existentialists like Martin Heidegger or Jean-Paul might want to give us a world in which the separate, allegedly "authentic" human being is the only reality, but this only goes to demonstrate what kind of drab tunnel vision they possessed. Nothing that lives can exist except in relationship. The illusion that a human being can exist separately and apart from other human beings is just that—an illusion. Complete isolation would be a nightmarish death in life.

Buber's ideas are similar to the Chinese idea of obtaining harmony within yourself by communion with nature or art. Oriental sages also tell us that difference is identity. We are able to define things only as they relate to other things—light against dark, life against death, creation against destruction, time against space, solid matter against shadows. You cannot have a front without a back, a dancer without a dance, or yin without yang. So whenever you encounter an Other, you are in reality encountering the Self. In other words, you are as much a part of the Other as the Other is of you. If you see an Other as some kind of enemy, as an It, you are not just harming him, you are harming yourself. You are also blocking out the most intense source of joy that a human being can have, the joy of communion. When you are able to encounter the Other as a Thou, as a person, thing, or idea which can be honored and interacted with, you are harmoniously flowing with the natural forces of the universe. This is how van Gogh encountered cypress trees or the way John Keats surrendered to a nightingale. Buber extended this idea to Divinity. He realized that no conception of Divinity could ever be adequate, but he also concluded that it didn't matter. What did matter was your ability to interact with or respond to the Divine. God could only be addressed, not expressed. Most importantly, you could find Divinity whenever you encountered any kind of a Thou. This means that you always have an ethical responsibility for the Thous you encounter. You can never treat them as means but only as ends. But this will never happen if you convince yourself that at least some of the Others on this planet are monstrously evil creatures who are out to destroy your precious in-group.

Well, enough of this for now. You're probably bored silly anyway. Catch you later.

Mona

* * *

April 2

I'm glad to hear that you agree with what I've been saying. But you tell me you're curious about one last thing—you want to know if I can say anything good about the contemporary Neo-Pagan movement. Janet, is this a trick question? You honestly think I might be able to acknowledge something positive?

Well, I wish I could. I would love to take back everything I've said until now about Neo-Pagan idiocy. But there's no chance of that. You cannot understand the true meaning of the term diddley squat until you start searching for the practical results of contemporary Neo-Pagan practices. I have known Neo-Pagans who have been caught up in the movement for many years now. These are reasonably intelligent people who have swallowed the whole Neo-Pagan hodge-podge without a blip. They read the right books, they make homey little spells, and they faithfully attend the rituals year after year. But are these people getting better? Do they ever acquire any life-enhancing changes in their personalities or their lives? Not that I can see. As time goes on, the only thing that happens to these people is a reinforcement of their most negative qualities. These are personalities who are totally lacking in self-awareness or inner resources of any sort, who live in a continual state of angry reaction to what other people say or do, who exist in complete denial about addictions and bad habits, and who do not see the kind of problems they are creating. They do not learn, and they keep getting worse.

When I finally got fed up with the healing and therapy that Neo-Pagan rituals were shoving down my throat, I wanted to cry a zillion times: let it go! The egocentric self is the problem in genuine spirituality, not the solution. So stop trying to build it up! Stop wallowing in hurts or resentments that allegedly need to be healed! Learn how to let things go. This is the only spiritual secret worth knowing. Learn how to release and flow. Dissolve into perception. Start watching the light, start watching your thoughts, and start transforming your perceptions into art instead of struggling to turn yourself into some kind of strident übermensch. Learn how to surrender to another human being, or to an experience, or to a sensation. Most important: stop telling yourself you're getting better and better and because, my dear, it ain't happening.

My only goal these days is directing my consciousness into an infinitely expanded present. I wish I had learned how to do this when I was younger, when I was still obsessed with the past (an irrelevant nuisance) or the future (nothing but a dream). The riches and glory of life are always right here, right now, right in Carver, Illinois. I watch the sunlight, and I am happy. I see the apples ripen in the old tree beside the house, and I am thrilled. The best moment of every day comes when Ralph takes me for his evening walk, and I can see the floor of heaven above me shining amid the glowing clouds and the radiant air. Each moment unfolds in its own special richness, even at the office, believe it or not. As long as I'm awake and aware, as long as the light is reaching my eyes and my ears are hearing the music of an ordinary day, I'm as rich as Croesus. These days I am actually living my life, instead of waiting for the future when everything is supposed to be better. Janet, the best piece of advice I can give you is to stop focusing on what's going to happen someday, when you find the new job, or the right guy, or the better salary. Heaven isn't somewhere beyond the stars, it's right here in every moment of your life, and it can be found whenever you stop to perceive it.

I've even found that my rigid self-conscious ego does sometimes disappear whenever I meditate. That's right, meditation. I still don't like the idea of spending several hours a day with a certain part of my anatomy plastered to a Zen cushion. However, I've learned that practicing meditative moments during the day does me a lot of good. You simply have to create moments for yourself when you can pass into silence and become pure awareness. Whenever I do this, I can't prevent thoughts from springing into in my mind, but I react the way good Buddhists tell me to react—I observe them and then I let them go. I let everything go. Nothing drives me crazy any longer. Whenever I can go into the moment and encounter whatever Other is present, I can turn myself into pure awareness. I've stopped wanting anything else out of life, except perhaps enough literary skill to transmute my experiences into sound and rhythm—and who cares if no one wants to read them? I like to think that this is what the Chinese mean by living in harmony with the Dao. When you're living in harmony with the Dao, you don't need religion, politics, pumpums, rituals, scripture, therapy, healing, empowerment, prayer, occult secrets, magic, crystals, travel, money, boyfriends, or creature comforts. You already have everything you need, right here, right now. Not that I'm ever going to be enough of a Chinese sage to live in complete harmony with the Dao, but at least nowadays I am experiencing a type of spiritual blessing that I never knew when I was younger.

Of course, dysfunctional witch that I was, it took an enormous amount of time for me to figure this out. Don't ask me why it took years for me to realize that those wonderful Neo-Pagan rituals weren't working. I was a True Believer. I was certain that I had found the only correct religious system on the planet. And so there I was, Mona Wilcox, an Emily Brontë wannabe, stuck in a silly, juvenile, superficial religious movement, one that had started out decadent at its beginning. I was letting somebody else hand me a belief system. I had started to—conform. I was listening to pumpums. I was wallowing in Seventies style therapy. I was talking to an invisible Mommy humanoid. I was wasting huge amounts of time trying to figure out pre-historic religious realities or discover ancient secrets, searching for clues about how things should be done. In my youth, my studies of Eastern religion had progressively freed my mind from the constrictions of my Presbyterian past, but contemporary Neo-Paganism had liberated me the way the Anschluss liberated Austria.

I can see now that I had gotten messily co-dependent about it all. If ever there is a one-way ticket to the ultimate in human misery, it has to be through co-dependence. We understand the concept of emotional co-dependence these days, the kind of addictive behavior people exhibit when they convince themselves that they cannot be happy without that one special person in their life. This special person can be partner, child, best friend, or parent, but they've always got to be around long enough for you to keep them under your control and feed off their energies. This is otherwise known as getting your next fix. Nowadays I realize that if you can't make yourself happy, no one else can. But during the days of my dismal youth, when I was wallowing in co-dependent swamps the likes of which you can't begin to imagine, I was in complete denial about my obsessive behavior. I wasn't in love with the idiot bozos I got involved with, I was in addiction, as deeply as any junkie mainlining heroin. Consider, if you will, my last boyfriend. Whenever I visited him in the county jail, I would tell myself that this would surely be the last time I'd have to talk to my dearly beloved through a slimy glass screen. This time he had learned his lesson, and now he was finally going to clean up his act. The perfect co-dependent attitude: no matter what the idiot does, no matter how many times he makes you miserable, you cannot live without him. But after his twelfth arrest I actually started to wonder if . . . maybe he wasn't worth it. You'd think that this might have occurred to me after his fifth, or sixth, or even seventh arrest, but when you're wallowing in co-dependency it takes a long time for the light to dawn. Especially if your vanity won't let you admit that the time and effort you've put into this relationship was all for naught. Of course, this particular boyfriend was constantly assuring me that it was never his fault he kept getting arrested, it was just bad luck. I believed him since it was what I wanted to believe, which sums up what co-dependency is. Throw reason out the window and hang on to the human substance for dear life. So what if you have to scrounge up bail money one more time, this time will be the last, and it's not as though you can live without him, is it?

But that idiot infatuation was nothing, absolutely nothing, compared to the spiritual co-dependent trap I had fallen into. Love is blind, but so is religion—and religion even more so. Making excuses about your boyfriend is not even remotely comparable to making excuses about your religion. Why, our religion is our ticket to eternity! Nothing matters as much as our religion! And here we are back to that wonderful forever, which no one has ever seen but which all good True Believers know is going to happen as soon as they kick the bucket. I had become as co-dependent about my belief system as any True Believer who ever lived, which meant that I had sunk into the ultimate in human wretchedness.

But if there is nothing more constricting than spiritual imprisonment, there are few things as liberating as freeing yourself from it. Here I must go back to Emerson again. I have been a card-carrying member of the Tribe of Waldo for many years now, and one of Waldo's most cherished concepts goes like this: whenever you find yourself in a dead relationship, a dead organization, a dead belief system, a dead anything, you cut your losses and move on. You jettison whatever is false and make room in your life for new space and energy. Granted it won't be easy for you to make a break, but it can be done. We are free every single moment of our lives to change our existence for the better. We simply have to be strong enough to jettison everything that holds us back, up to and including our religion of choice. Let it go. Let your divine concept go as well. It's easier than you might expect. As it happens, one of the most effortless things I ever did in my life was rid myself of the Mommy Humanoid. Pow! She was gone forever.

I didn't need her. What I did need was spiritual liberation. The flying broomstick kind of spiritual liberation. It occurs to me that I've wandered away from the broomstick once again. But this is exactly what had happened at this point in my life. I was so busy getting healed and empowered that I had forgotten I wanted to fly. It will not come as a surprise to you to hear that in all the years I tried to be a Neo-Pagan, not once did I ever hear a single so-called witch mention a flying broomstick. I mean, there was the whole entire sky right above everybody's heads just waiting to be flown into, and do you think any of them bothered? Silly question.

The Neo-Pagan path had led to a dead end. So had all the other religious systems I had ever studied. What on earth was I supposed to do next? It was time to go back to my rocking chair and brood. Fortunately almost immediately I realized that I had the answer. What I needed was spiritual self-reliance. Eureka! This was surely the great witch secret! A good medieval witch wouldn't have bothered about what her fellow witches were doing in order to fly, nor would she have paid attention to established religions or hidden occult secrets. Why should she have bothered? Just trusting her own personal experience would have been enough to get her airborne. In other words, she would have established her own relationship to the universe in the best Emersonian fashion. If I could do that as well, I would finally be able to fly.

So this was what I needed to do. Establish my own relationship to the universe. But . . . well, here was me, and there was the universe. Now what?

Mona

* * *

April 7

Surprise! I didn't have a clue.

And I was immediately aware of a trifling little problem. If I wanted to establish my own relationship to the universe, I needed to understand at least something about it. But what can anyone truly comprehend that great big cosmic wallop visible up there in the sky? In case you haven't noticed, the universe happens to be kind of big. It goes on forever. How can one paltry human being hope to comprehend cosmic reality when the greatest minds in human history have consistently failed throughout the centuries?

I pondered this question for a long time until I decided that the answer was simple. If you want to understand the universe, you have to turn yourself into a fully operational transparent eyeball. Emerson's transparent eyeball, that is, his famous metaphor which appeared in his essay on Nature:

Standing on the bare ground,—my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space,—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.[32]

The idea of a transparent eyeball has attracted notice, usually derogatory, since this essay was first published. Today it is regarded as a bit much, even for Emerson, who does not possess a light and lively prose style. Well, okay, but the whole idea of a transparent eyeball also happens to be a vivid image, and if you want to be a poet there is nothing more delectable than a vivid image, if only of the detached retina variety. Emerson was trying to tell us how we can get a direct experience of Divinity or cosmic consciousness. All we have to do is turn ourselves into some kind of transcendental observer, and then we will be able to uplift ourselves (lev!) to a new level of existence. In other words, if you want upwardness, what you need is some kind of slam-bang, no-holds-barred, knock-you-right-out-of-you-skull mystical experience. This is the kind of encounter that the greatest spiritual seekers have had, when boundaries dissolve, reality shifts, and your paltry little life is transformed by some kind of ultimate spiritual experience. Not just mystics, but artists and visionaries seem to have had these kinds of encounters. When it happens to a creative human being, it tends to be more of an ecstatic experience than something spiritual. Said the Greek poet Pindar more than two millennia ago: "Things of a day! What are we, and what are we not? A dream about a shadow is man: yet, when some god-given splendour falls, a glory of light comes over him and his life is sweet".[33] This is what you need for transparent eyeballhood, the kind of intense spiritual experience when your whole being dissolves into a single ecstatic moment.

I have already mentioned how fond I am of intense experiences, and there are none more intense than moments of ecstasy. The word ecstasy comes from the Greek ex-stasis, which means "to stand out from". When you're ecstatic, you've standing outside of stasis, and I'm sure you've noticed by now that stasis is not my favorite way of being. An ecstatic moment is an instant of time when some kind of greatness happens, and you find yourself surrendering to a rapturous sense of cosmic wonder. In moments like these, the world no longer seems routine, dull, or ordinary. Concepts disappear. Abstract thought vanishes. Everything about the world seems clarified, and even the most ordinary event or object can take on vivid meaning utterly out of proportion to its normal reality. You are left with a feeling of unity and harmony, and you seem to be free of everything. I've spoken many times about things that will set you free, but the only way to feel free is when you are experiencing these kinds of moments.

The most famous ecstatic moment in world literature is Marcel Proust's encounter with tea and cookie.[34] Specifically, linden tea and Madeleine cookies, a teatime treat I have occasionally tried to replicate but without the concomitant metaphysical earthquake. Proust's narrator eats his cookie and sips his tea, and suddenly the universe trembles, he is flung outside of time and space, and he is socked in the head by an intimation of immortality that even William Wordsworth would envy. In this one ecstatic moment he dissolves into enraptured awareness. But there's more: Proust goes on to experience several other ecstatic moments in his life, which he also chronicles in his 3,000 page masterpiece. At the end of the saga he has another mind-splitting instant when he realized that he has a vocation, that of a writer, and his life is filled with new spiritual meaning. Forget about winning the lottery or vacationing in Tahiti: miraculous flashes like these are the most valuable things that can ever happen to us in our lives.

So if I wanted to find spiritual self-reliance, what I obviously needed to do was turn myself into some kind of mystic, preferably a mystic who could conjure up huge quantities of ecstatic bliss whenever she pleased. However, I was immediately aware of a problem. What with me and my plain Midwestern soul, I was about as mystical as Warren G. Harding. If the Angel Minestrone tried to appear to me, I'd tell it to scram; if my Kundalini awakened, I'd tell it to shut up and go back to sleep. Once upon a time, during the days of my degenerate youth, the only thing I wanted out of life was an awakened Kundalini. Other kids might dream of designer jeans, Nike shoes, or late model Ford Mustangs, but me, idiot that I was, I wanted a live-and-kicking Kundalini. I mean, an awakened Kundalini sounded like the most totally awesome kind of enlightenment anyone could manage, filled with plenty of nifty special effects that would set me apart from the slobs I had to deal with, and once I had the thing up and running my problems would naturally be solved.

Well, it never happened. My Kundalini will probably continue snoozing for the rest of my life. And a fat lot of success I've had over the years trying to engender any other kind of mystical experience. I have studied plenty of books on the subject over the years, which I have found to be both interesting and irritating in equal measures. What were the great mystics doing that generated their supreme experiences? Why couldn't they explain how they did it step by detailed step? Why did they keep saying that there were no concrete, practical methods that could deliver the spiritual prize to your front door? British writer Evelyn Underhill produced the classic book on the subject, Mysticism, but her main message is that you cannot force a mystical experience to happen. She also wrote a shorter book called Practical Mysticism, where she gives valuable advice about meditation, awareness, and contemplation, all of which sound similar to Zen. However, she repeatedly insists that you can't prod a mystical experience into occurring. I suppose I could have followed her guidelines, and after twenty years or so something might happen—if I were lucky. This sounded like as much fun as sitting cross-legged on that good old meditation cushion. Besides, even if I were willing to invest huge amounts of time in a spiritual discipline, there was no guarantee that I would end up with something as spectacular as St. Teresa getting stabbed through the heart with a golden arrow. I didn't want a milquetoast mystical experience. I wanted a world-class gargantuan zap.

There were additional problems as well. I was doing other things in my life than didn't leave much time for mystical pursuit. I had also grown wary of the innumerable divine concepts that people have dreamed up over the centuries, a large number of which frequently turn up in the flesh, so to speak, in the visions of the mystics. What was I supposed to do if the wrong kind of divine concept, such as the Mommy concept, started to materialize right before my eyes? Besides, there was always the nuisance of spiritual materialism. I didn't want a mystical experience to turn me into a conceited ego. I was also aware that over the years I had never exhibited any kind of spiritual strength or maturity. Certainly I had never experienced anything which had given me a sense of certainty about the Divine. The fact that I had been suckered for too many years in the Neo-Pagan movement was a clear indication of my own weakness. I had never even managed to generate the kind of peak experience described by Abraham Maslow.[35] As far as mysticism was concerned, I was a complete dud.

But then I got to thinking. I might be a mystical dud, but I was also a wise woman with an herb garden. If I wanted to generate a genuine mystical experience, maybe there was a plant which could help me do it. I remembered that there had always been a whole lot more to a medieval witch's garden than culinary herbs. There are certain plants which can do more for you than spice up the soup, namely those plants known as entheogens. Over the centuries wise women were traditionally known not just for their herbal skills, but for their knowledge of these kinds of hallucinogenic plants. It wasn't just parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme back in the good old herbal days. Wise women also grew plants like poppy, hellebore, hemlock, belladonna, aconitum, mandrake, and cannabis. Scholars who have studied surviving witchcraft records have generally concluded that flying on a broomstick didn't really happen; the women who claimed they could fly were experiencing a hallucinatory state brought on by some kind of enthenogenic brew, presumably boiled up in a dark little cauldron. Modern experimenters who have been stupid enough to dabble with the original flying receipts have reported wild dreams and sensations of soaring through the air. These formulae don't make pleasant reading. Many of the hallucinogenic plants can definitely alter your consciousness, but they are also deadly poisons. You wonder how people survived even a moderate dose.

But what about relatively harmless psychoactive drugs? I decided that the more intelligent wise women would never have been foolish enough to ingest drugs that could wreak havoc on their systems. They might have known how to prepare some kind of harmless herbal brew which would generate mystical vision. A brew that could be used with impunity but which would also deliver cosmic consciousness . . . maybe this was the key to their spiritual freedom. This way all you needed to do was concoct the correct herbal/hallucinogenic soup, and presto! Mystical vision would be yours! Well, this idea has been knocking around since its glory days in the Sixties. Turn on, tune in, drop out. Expand your consciousness. Transcend space and time. Escape ordinary reality. Drop acid and find God. What better way to dig the universe, man. And if you've decided that spiritual self-reliance is the way to go, then maybe what you need is the right kind of drug to alter your consciousness.

Well, if only . . . if only there existed some kind of non-addictive and trustworthy drug which could alter my consciousness, produce ecstasy, help me find the Divine, and engender the other clichés, I'd be the first to swallow it. But if you experiment with any kind of mind-altering drug, even the milder ones like coffee or wine, what you get isn't vision but hangover. Hangovers are not fun. Hangovers are our bodies' way of telling us that we have harmed them. You are never going to find poetry, vision, rapture, or richness of experience in a hangover. The reality of all drugs is that they inevitably produce some kind of unpleasant physical reaction, a reaction which gets worse as the years go on. I didn't see how any substance which damaged my body could possibly produce a sense of cosmic consciousness within me.

It is also important to realize that not a single spiritual leader in India has ever recommended the use of drugs as some kind of spiritual crutch. And India is a country where cannabis has been cultivated for millennia. That tells you something right there. I doubt that I could come up with the name of one single human being whose drug use has generated a genuine state of mystical consciousness. Certainly the drinkers and the druggies that I've known here in Carver have never demonstrated any kind of spiritual maturity. This is especially true of the ones who didn't pass the electric Kool-Aid acid test and were left with permanent psychological impairment. Not to mention the ones who wound up helplessly addicted. You never hear an addict talk about mystical vision or a sense of cosmic unity. You hear what you always hear from substance abusers—excuses. Drug trips do you about as much good as watching television. It's altered consciousness as entertainment.

Well, so much for taking a drug trip to find the Divine. But what about a real trip? If I were trying to establish my own relation to the universe, maybe I needed to travel to some kind of authentic spiritual territory where mystical apprehension would be mine for the asking. I have occasionally wished that I had enough money to do more traveling, not to Cancun or Bermuda exactly, but to some kind of sacred site where the cliché—I mean where the Veil—is thin. The kind of place where you can easily cross over into an alternate reality and achieve genuine spiritual illumination. My own passage to India. After all, thousands of spiritual seekers are constantly heading off to sundry multicultural lands these days, where cosmic consciousness is more readily available than it is here, anywhere but here, in boring, tiresome, shopping mall America. So if you want a genuine mystical zap, what you've got to do is jet off to an ashram in India, or a Zen monastery in Japan, or maybe Glastonbury in England. It's places like these where that good old Veil is thin, but make sure you don't drink the water, and take along your own toilet tissue just in case. There it's sacred; here it's just potato chips and plastics. Nowadays innumerable spiritual seekers are convinced that the other place has got to be as spiritual as that other time, when Divinity was talking to the camels and you could turn mystical at the drop of a sistrum. Other places, other times, but never right here, right now, what we've got in 21^st century Wichita is a lot of unspiritual zilch.

The 20^th century witnessed an endless number of ardent, right-thinking, self-important political pilgrims who trotted off to Stalin's Russia or Castro's Cuba in an attempt to find meaning and came back to inform the capitalist creeps who were paying for their tenure that they had found paradise on earth. Mark Lilla in The Reckless Mind has a memorable name for them: political voyeurs, those earnestly earnest souls "who made carefully choreographed tours of the tyrant's domains with return tickets in hand, admiring the collective farms, the tractor factories, the sugarcane groves, the schools, but somehow never visiting the prisons".[36] Fortunately these kind of political losers have mostly faded away, but not completely: they have been replaced by their more ethereal counterparts, those fervent, right-thinking spiritual voyeurs who are racking up frequent flyer miles in an effort to find some kind of mystical meaning somewhere, somehow, since they knows perfectly well they're not going to find it in their ordinary American life. You can't find it here, nothing ever happens here except shopping and work and television, but somewhere over the rainbow there has to be a real spiritual world filled with holy people and divine revelations, where the living is more intense, the horizons wider, the stars brighter. The spiritual voyeur in search of the spiritual Emerald City. That's where you have to go to find sacred meaning, as far away as possible from your own backyard, where the lawn needs to be mowed anyway. But wait a minute. Didn't Dorothy come to a different conclusion about the great American backyard?

One type of spiritual excursion which has become popular in recent years is the kind where you get to combine a journey with a substance. In search of the ultimate high, as one book title would have it,[37] or maybe killing two trips with one stoned. These spiritual voyeurs aren't interested in heading off to major league Veil sites such as Delphi or Stonehenge. No, they're determined to track down an authentic substance as well as some scenery. So they jet off to tropical Africa or the Brazilian rainforest, any place that still possesses a fair percentage of the type of pumpum known as a shaman. And if the price is right, these kindly shamans are more than willing to dish out a correct dosage of the local substance. So down the hatch the substance goes, which thereupon provides our spiritual seekers with something much more meaningful than a Kodak moment at the Pyramids. Wow, how lucky can a voyeur get? They've found the real thing, some genuine Stone Age types who've spent their entire lives either swallowing or smoking, and you can't get more real than that. But for some reason the books that these people write never mention bad trips, liver damage, or even vomit. And why are they writing books? Why are they interested in royalties after they've had their mystical awakening?

A nice corollary to this perfect scenario is that you get to enjoy a multicultural experience in an exotic setting, where you can honor the validity and integrity of a primitive culture. Not that you're intending to move in next door to the shaman's shack permanently, of course. You will be clutching your return tickets to your breast as firmly as your political predecessors. Yet how superior you are to those political obsessives! You aren't trying to find paradise on earth in some kind of dreary Marxist collectivism, oh, no—not you, you're after nothing less than the ultimate in mystical transcendence. In many ways, the combination of plane ticket plus substance is the best kind of excursion for the contemporary spiritual voyeur, especially the ones who've gotten bored with their Bud Lites. Not that your average mystic wannabe will ever acknowledge as much. After all, unlike those unenlightened millions that surround them, they've had a chance to experience genuine sacredness, they know what holiness means, and they've turned into such highly evolved beings that they no longer have to bother about the crummy Jones next door, whose conversation runs the full gamut from the Chicago Bears to the Chicago Bulls. Let the applause begin.

These earnest spiritual seekers always manage to forget one important little fact, namely that they are taking their vainglorious egos along with them on their spiritual excursions. This creates a problem. If you are already wallowing in spiritual materialism, a visit to a sacred site is probably the most detrimental thing you can experience. You're not going to come back with any kind of heightened spirituality but with tons more conceit, this time of the most egregiously gruesome variety. My own experience tells me that the greatest spiritual seekers always have one thing in common, namely that they are right where they are. They don't need ayahuasca in South America or snow leopards in the Himalayas to find meaning. They know that spiritual truth is always right there before them, in the ordinary life that they are leading. Genuine spirituality can be found literally everywhere, even in American suburbia. "Whoever does not accept the conditions of his life," says Charles Baudelaire, "sells his soul".[38] In his Journals, Henry David Thoreau states: "It matters not where or how far you travel—the farther commonly the worse—but how much alive you are".[39]

Janet, would you like to hear about one of the first things I discovered when I started flying on the broom? It's very simple, namely that Bladud refuses to go where I want him to go. This came as a vast surprise to me when I first started flying, since I had automatically assumed that I would be in charge of the flights. This is not the reality I've known with Bladud. He goes only where he wants to go, and only when he wants to do it. It is Bladud, not me, who makes the decisions. This has been a valuable lesson for me in knowing how to let go, in not trying to be a control freak, and in allowing the flying to become an organic Zen experience. I've applied these lessons to the rest of my life, and I've discovered that I no longer need to go anywhere for anything. Staying right where I am helps me to remain fully present in my own space and time. The best place to go when you think you need to move is exactly nowhere. A bitter broom lesson but a valid one. A true spiritual conveyance will take you exactly nowhere.

But this was a lesson which I learned only after I figured out how to fly. And as usual, I've wandered from the point again, haven't I? So back we go to the secret of getting up into the air. I had realized that I needed to turn myself into a fully functional transparent eyeball if I wanted to get off the ground, but how in the world was I supposed to do that? Especially since I had concluded that drugs weren't going to help me, nor would travel. What was I supposed to do next?

And all at once the answer was obvious.

Mona

* * *

April 20

That's right. The answer was something that was right in front of me, as plain as day. But it was something that I had never before noticed, even though it was very much . . . obvious.

Janet, stop and think for a moment about what the word obvious means. It specifically refers to something that you cannot miss. Yet how many times in our lives do we miss seeing that which is right in front of us? There are too many people in this world who are never able to perceive that which is most noticeable in their lives, even if it's blinking in pink neon light two inches in front of their eyes. And, believe it or not, this is the one idea that started me towards the solution of broomstick upwardness, namely perception. If I needed some kind of mystical wallop to find the answer to upwardness, I realized it would never happen unless I managed to perceive it. Mystical vision happens to be vision. It is an act of seeing. It occurs in people who happen to be looking.

Perception is one of the great Western ideals, right up there with the value of reason and the uniqueness of the human personality. Perception of physical reality happens to matter to us Westerners. This is not something that is emphasized in the East, where the physical world is the nothingness of Maya, and whatever Maya may or may not be, it sure as heck doesn't sound like something worth noticing. If I had gone through my life thinking that the world is some kind of illusion, I am certain I never would have figured out how to fly through the skies on Bladud. The secret of aerial upwardness came to me only when I realized that I was not being attentive enough to the world around me. If I wanted to turn myself into a transparent eyeball who could get a glimpse of mystical reality, what I needed to do was start looking.

I wonder if the idea of perception is stressed at your school in Chicago. You are probably getting that tedious indoctrination into political correctness which passes for education these days. Perception, like everything else that truly matters in our existence, is something that cannot be taught. However, it most definitely can be learned, and by anyone willing to make an effort. I wish I had understood the value of perception when I was younger, but it was never mentioned at any school I attended. Learning how to truly perceive the world around me should have been the goal of my misbegotten youth, instead of a college degree, a decent relationship, vacations, creature comforts, or any of the other yuppie crap which is supposed to matter in our culture. You cannot live a successful poetic life unless you are able to perceive the world around you as intensely as you possibly can.

One thing I've noticed over the years is that there is a colossal difference between perceiving the world only vaguely or remotely, and being utterly and forcefully aware of everything you encounter. Most people are only partially alive to what they see and hear. They scatter their awareness to the winds, or they're trapped in tunnel vision and perceive only what flatters their ego. You can never tell people like this that they aren't truly aware of the world around them since they know perfectly well that they are—they are living, breathing human beings, aren't they? And how can you be a human being without awareness? Well, here's some news: if you go through life with your powers of perception only barely functioning, and with your eyes and ears shutting out the world thanks to the mental noise in your heads, no, you're not truly aware. You're only barely functioning. You're a dead human walking. As for me, I like to think that in recent years I have truly started to pay attention to the world around me. And since I've started to do it, my own small corner of the world in Carver, Illinois has begun to afford me endless delight. This never happened when I was young; maybe you have to reach mid-life to learn how to watch the world instead of the television. Mind you, I don't spend each day transported with exhilarated rapture at the sights and sounds that surround me. I have my ups and downs like everyone else. But I have learned how to be open to most everything I encounter, and if I can do it, anyone can.

Not that this was an easy trick to acquire. Several years ago I read that the light in Venice always shimmers with a silver glow: the water and the sky of the Venetian cityscape were constantly blending into each other to produce a glittering atmosphere which shone like precious metal. I remember thinking: now why can't Carver, Illinois be more like Venice, Italy? Why can't I see some silver light each day when I'm doing the laundry, or standing at the Xerox machine, or taking out the garbage? If a town like Carver has any kind of light at all, it is typical American light from streetlights, fluorescents, neon signs, televisions, and the unsubtle glow from the Golden Arches. But when I finally began to pay attention to the natural light I could see here in Carver, I discovered a whole galaxy of precious luminosity surrounding me at all times: shimmering dawns, radiant afternoons, mysterious twilights, the sparkle of light upon water, the gentle glow of the moon . . . Even when the sky was the color of flour on a dull November day, the light could glow like incandescent pearl. The light which surrounded me was always changing, dissolving, and transforming as each precious moment unfolded. I realized that I would never have a boring or uninteresting moment in my life if I would only start watching the light. So what if I didn't have a Venetian canal outside my window? The natural light in Carver was enough to provide me with endless enchantment. I simply had to focus my attention and look.

It's always fun to examine photographs of great artists like Pablo Picasso or Augustus John, just to see the demented appearance in their bulging eyes. They are staring at you as if they had just escaped from the nearest lunatic asylum. But it's not dementia—they are simply seeing. They are taking in as much of the world as their eyes will let them, and they don't know how to be oblivious to any feature or object in their line of vision. "Le poète," said André Gide, "est celui qui regarde. Et que voit-il?—Le Paradis".[40] Someone who looks, just looks, and what he sees is paradise. One of John Keats' friends wrote about him:

Nothing seemed to escape him, the song of the bird, and the undernote of response from covert to hedge, the rustle of some animal, the changing of the green and brown lights and furtive shadows, the motions of the wind—just how it took certain tall flowers and plants—and the wayfaring of the clouds: even the features and gestures of passing tramps, the color of one woman's hair, the smile on one child's face, the furtive animalism below the deceptive humanity in many of the vagrants, even the hats, clothes, shoes, wherever these conveyed the remotest hint as to the real self to the wearer.[41]

So if you start really looking at everything which surrounds you, you will find all the treasures of the universe. Says the Chinese poet Wang Wei: "To gaze upon the clouds of autumn, a soaring exaltation in the soul; to feel the spring breeze stirring wild, exultant thoughts; where is there in the possession of gold and jewels to compare with delights like these?"[42] He's got it exactly right. If you can stand as a free human being between the earth and the sky, you are capable of filling your whole being with infinite delight—just as long as you make an effort to touch, smell, taste, listen, and look. You will discover that the natural forms you encounter will zap you into an almost constant state of bliss.

Heightened perception also brings one other added benefit. I have learned that the more frequently you go on red alert to the world around you, the more you want to create something out of what you have encountered. I've always known that I can't force inspiration to come to me—no one can. But if you start increasing your awareness of the world around you, strange things will start to happen in your life. Someone like me will want to sit down and form words into rhythm. An artist like you would put line or color on a piece of paper. The urge to create will start burgeoning out of you, and whatever your talent, you will inevitably want to take advantage of it. Janet, you've probably wondered if you will ever be able to work with canvas and oil the way van Gogh created his purple irises, filling them with such life that they practically jump out of the picture and slap you in the face. Well, I guarantee that your talents will improve exponentially if you learn how to go on red alert to the world around you—to nature, to art, to music, to other people, to anything and everything that you encounter. You need to start wallowing in sensation the way Dylan Thomas did, or perceive color and radiance like Renoir, or turn the natural sounds of the earth into the kind of divine harmony that Beethoven heard ringing in his ears. Forget what you think you are learning in the classroom. Only through intensity of awareness are great artists made.

At any rate . . . let me now take a moment now to summarize my argument. I realized that if I wanted to fly on a broomstick, I needed to establish my own relationship with the universe. This meant that I had to generate some kind of mystical vision. But then I realized that mystical vision wasn't going to happen unless I knew how to perceive the world around me with as much alertness as I could manage. Granted that I was already aware of what I was seeing and hearing, but I was still something of a vegetating lump. I had to figure out how to perceive the world with the kind of entranced absorption that the greatest creative minds always seem to manage. If I could manage this, then surely some kind of mystical perception would be mine—and upwards I would go.

So I started to ask myself what great creative spirits were doing to enlarge their perceptive abilities. What did they have in their lives or their personalities that enabled them to lose themselves in what they perceived? Carver, Illinois wasn't any different from any other place on earth. Its majestic pageant was all around me. Why wasn't I responding to it with the kind of rapturous intensity that you always find in supremely great minds? Well, after much cogitation, I realized that part of the answer is simple, namely that perception is always intentional. What we perceive is never accidental—it is always deliberate. We don't notice everything that swims into our range of vision—we pick and choose what we pay attention to, even though we are seldom conscious that we are making a choice. The world around us happens to be a chaotic conglomeration of objects, concepts, and energies. We filter what we perceive in order to make sense of our existence. As a result most of us have imprisoning patterns of thought or behavior which deaden us to the world. An ability to truly perceive the world comes only when you can free yourself from the blocks you have set up within your psyche to shut out huge chunks of reality. Only when your senses have learned how to follow form or sound without preconception, without numbing habit or worrisome anxiety, will your mind start to expand in ways you never thought possible. Freedom of perception is the single most essential psychological sensation we can possess.

So far, so good. If I wanted to increase my perceptive skills, this was what I needed to do—be intentional. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that there were other things I could do. For instance, I realized that if I made enough time for silence, for contemplation, for perception of beauty in my life, I would become much more aware of everything that I encountered. This meant that I needed to pare down my life so that my whole existence would be as unencumbered as possible. Of course, good poor poet that I am, I had always liked the idea of a minimalist life. People need surprisingly little to live richly and happily. An existence without mental or physical clutter enables you to concentrate your full attention on a single event or form, which you can then experience as intensely as possible. If you make an effort to live your life with nothing but essentials, you will discover that you are living in a world where you have infinite space and time. In a life like this, you can truly savor every physical sensation that comes your way.

But I recognized that this still wasn't enough; indeed, it could easily lead me astray. I realized that I was also going to have to keep my focus on what was most ordinary in my life, or else I would perceive exactly nothing. I had already realized that the little things of this world, the things that are usually overlooked or imperfect, are the objects which can give us the most profound spiritual revelations. Janet, are you familiar with Walter Pater, the celebrated British aesthete? Much to the scandal of 19^th century Brits, who knew perfectly well that the goal of life was empire building, Pater urged intensity of perception at the supreme aim of existence. You are probably familiar with his most celebrated quote: "To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain his ecstasy, is success in life . . ."[43] I ought to agree with these famous words, and I do find much that is valuable in them—that famous hard, gemlike flame will do you a lot more good than a January sale at the mall. The trouble is Pater's highly rarefied perception. The good Oxford don simply couldn't perceive anything that was ordinary or humdrum. Indeed, in book after book, Pater never pays attention to much of anything except the deaths of beautiful children or adolescents. In the Paterian universe, you don't croak if you've got acne—you get to live. Shove a corpse under Pater's nose, and he'll notice it, but hold a tulip in front of his face, and he goes blank. Pater's long search for heightened aesthetic perception led only to a life-denying decadence. "The sun he shines on me, he makes me happy. I eat a good fish, he makes me happy," says Melina Mercouri in Never on Sunday. This was what I was after. I wanted to feel the sun and taste the food and experience the living glory of the present moment as intensely as I could, no matter how ordinary it was. If I couldn't manage that, I couldn't manage anything.

So if I wanted to acquire transparent eyeballhood, I had to concentrate on perception, I had to be intentional, and I had to focus on what was most ordinary in my life. I also realized that one more thing was necessary, namely surrender. That is to say, surrender of my ego. If I wanted mystical vision, I was going to have to let go of everything that made up Mona Wilcox, including my ego, my consciousness, and my entire sense of myself. What Emerson called my mean egotism was going to have to vanish. Now I am aware that once again I am not making a whole lot of sense. Here I am emphasizing the value of perception, but I'm also saying that your ego can't be around when the perception is taking place. Is that supposed to make sense? Don't you yourself have to engage in the act of perception if perception is going to occur? Not by a long shot. The self-conscious ego is the single biggest impediment to intense and passionate perception. If you are constantly aware of your thoughts or your reactions, you will never be able to surrender to a sensation or a moment. Your nuisance of an ego will continually get in the way of what you are perceiving and will do its tidy best to block things out. If you want to truly perceive the world with the utmost intensity, you have got to start letting go of your consciousness, your memories, and your expectations. Only then can you abandon yourself to what you are perceiving.

Well, my dear niece, it would not surprise me if you are immediately dismissing this idea. I have trouble with it myself. As I've already mentioned, I am someone who happens to like the aggressive Western ego. I think it is one of the glories of the universe. The annihilation of the human personality in Eastern culture has always been its most troubling aspect to me. I also have a hard time discerning exactly what good this annihilation has done during the past several millennia. Why should you bother to assert yourself or stand up against injustice if there's no you in the first place? Long live the Western ego, at least when it occasionally manages to change the world. But the opposite of this is the bullheaded Western ego, those would-be Fausts who want to lord it over the rest of us and pile up the treasures of the earth. These are the kind of megalomaniacs you find in money grubbers, assorted politicians, and hysterical feminists. These human types we could very well do without. It's only when you can relax the grip of your individual self that you are able to move to a higher level of consciousness. So if we're talking about engendering a mystical experience, some kind of surrender of the ego is necessary. Learning how to surrender your ego to what you are perceiving is the single most necessary quality for transparent eyeballhood.

Me, I'm not capable of complete ego surrender. Few people are. But there can be nothing as thrilling as occasionally stepping out of your conscious self and surrendering to whatever is before you in the present moment. Absolutely and utterly surrendering. Not just noticing something, mind you, but becoming absorbed by it, melting into it, becoming so enraptured with it that your self-consciousness evaporates into thin air. This can be one of the most joyous experiences you can ever have. This isn't necessarily a lessening of your own being but more of a growth or an expansion, the way a seedling moves both downwards into the soil and upwards into the air. When these kinds of genuine encounters take place, then you can feel renewal, and an expansive sense of freedom. I've learned that these moments can be especially precious when you can surrender to the little things of the natural world: the gold of the morning sunlight, or the chill of the first autumn breezes, or the fragrance of a blossoming flower. This, by the way, is John Keats' idea of negative capability. Keats possessed as aggressive and as rational a Western ego as you can possibly find—there is a famous story of him bowing down in reverence when he came across a portrait of Voltaire. But Keats also possessed unparalleled powers of surrender. He was constantly losing himself in one experience after another. If you are able to let yourself go into this kind of egolessness, your soul expands, your horizons widen, and boy, oh boy, does imaginative vision ever start burgeoning out of you. If you can manage this more frequently as time goes on, you are well on the way to that phantom known as mystical vision.

What this adds up to is the idea of a permeable ego. Not the complete annihilation of the ego, as the Buddhists would have it, but a way to relax the boundaries of your self-conscious personality. A better way to describe it might be the idea of an ego flux—a constant movement between the receptive ego, which can lose itself in the sound of a concerto or the light of the stars, and the creative ego which can transmute the experience into art. A transparent eyeball that actually does something. This is a practical compromise between East's annihilation of the ego and the West's Dr. Faust. I think that the greatest artists have always exhibited this kind of equilibrium: they exhibit a constantly transforming ego which never stops unfolding, growing, changing, and evolving. If I've learned anything from clouds, it's the necessity to keep moving and flowing wherever the wind takes you. Get enough of these kind of experiences, transmute them into shape or form, and you will find yourself in heaven on earth.

But one more thing is necessary. It's not enough just to lose your self-consciousness—you also need to unite your being with something outside of yourself. I'm talking about the way a poet can become one with the autumn moon or a painter with a field of wildflowers. This is perhaps the key to mystical vision—your consciousness somehow merges with something outside of yourself, whether animal, flower, human being, or the stars in the sky. Whenever you encounter an Other, remember, you are in reality encountering the Self. I have always been fond of Japanese haiku, and a good haiku is always a record of a yielding to a sensation, an impression, or a thought. You cannot write haiku unless you are able to become spiritually united with something outside yourself. Shakespeare didn't write these kinds of poems, but he possessed the quality of surrender par excellence. His ability to create a whole galaxy of believable human beings tells me that he must have been constantly losing himself in one damn thing after another, whether human, vegetable, or mineral. The overwhelming spiritual intensity to be found in his last plays has got to be a direct result of this quality. Let us also remember that poetic metaphor is a merging of one Thou to another. Metaphor, simile . . . the techniques which poets use boil down to one thing only—a mingling of one entity with another. A becomes B, or A is like B, or A is B.

But how are you supposed to lessen your boundaries and surrender to something outside yourself? How can anyone who is riddled with a self-conscious ego learn how to yield, at least partially, to an object or a pattern or a moment? Can it be deliberately done the way Matisse or Shelley might have done it, not to mention a genuine mystic like the great Quaker George Fox? Says James Joyce in Ulysses: "Any object, intensely regarded, may be a gate of access to the incorruptible eon of the gods".[44] Gee whiz, that doesn't sound too difficult. I've just got to regard something intensely, right? Or maybe attempt what Plotinus says in the Fifth Ennead: "in perfect knowing, subject and object are identical".[45] If he could manage it, why not me?

All of which brings me back to the secret of broomstick upwardness. What with all the cogitating I had been doing about perception and mystical vision, I had finally concluded that some kind of ego loss was necessary in order to get off the ground. I was never going to lev unless I jettisoned all my self-consciousness, my selfishness, and my psychodramas. I was going to have to surrender my own dreary ego to . . . well, to what? Why, to the broom, of course! That had to be the solution! I needed to merge my own being with that of the broom. Then its secrets would surely be revealed to me. Well, duh.

The only problem was that this idea didn't sit too well with my image of myself as a practical and sensible rationalist. Well, so what? I decided that if I started perceiving Bladud as intensely as I could, which meant some kind of surrender to him, I would discover what we both needed to do to get off the ground. This meant I had to shove my own self-consciousness out of the way in order to hear what Bladud had to tell me. Naturally I didn't expect the broom to start talking to me, but I was certain that if I could join my essential being to his in some kind of metaphysical fashion, I would be able to figure out what I needed to know. All of which meant that I would have to relinquish my attachment to everything that made up Mona Wilcox. I could not allow my mind to remain standing at the sidelines applauding my skill at surrendering myself. What was needed was a complete and utter capitulation of my ego right to the point where I wouldn't be there any longer. In other words, this would be a kind of death. I was going to have to kill myself off. Achieve some kind of non-existence.

But how in the world was I supposed to manage it? This was the key problem, and for it I had no solution. Days and weeks started to pass. I continued with my regular routines, but every second of my leisure time was passed in dismal cogitation. How in the world could I force myself to let go of my ego? And then surrender my being to Bladud? What was the secret? How could it be done? So engrossed did I become that I seemed to be existing in a trance. I was even forgetting to eat, and this was the most painless diet I had ever attempted. If you want to lose weight without the slightest effort, all you need to do is spend a few weeks figuring out how to merge with a broomstick. You'll be able to put Weight Watchers out of business.

I finally decided that if I started practicing some kind of union with Bladud, this might do the trick. Practice always makes perfect, right? But by this time in my life, I had already been practicing a merge with Bladud every chance I got, and what did I have to show for it? Exactly nothing. I was living, breathing, and thinking about nothing except the lousy broomstick day after day. I pondered Bladud when I was driving to work. I mused about him when I was running errands. In the evenings I held him like a cat, stroking and petting him. The weeks continued to pass. Nothing. I tried singing to Bladud. Nothing. I tried dancing with him. Nothing. I spent one entire Saturday evening sitting in the dark with him trying to feel him and sense his aliveness. Nothing. For several weeks I kept him under the bed, hoping that his being would invade my dreams. Nothing. I even made him an acorn necklace from the nuts of my favorite oak and tied it around the shaft. Yet more nothing.

One day I decided it would help if I started eating corn. Bladud was a broom fashioned out of the great American spiritual plant, remember, and what better way to merge with a plant than by eating it? I started swallowing corn until I was ready to choke on it. I had grits for breakfast, corn bread for lunch, and succotash for dinner. I searched my cookbooks for corn and yet more corn recipes, and for weeks corn was all I cooked: muffins, Johnny cakes, hush puppies, creamed corn, corn chowder, popcorn, corn on the cob, tortillas, corn casserole, you name the corn dish and I tell you I swallowed it. Actually this part of it I enjoyed since you can never eat too much corn. But yet again nothing. I started writing haikus to Bladud. My former boyfriends should have been so lucky. For a while I was certain that this was the solution, but guess what? And don't ask me to quote any of my Bladud haikus—give me a break. The weeks kept passing. Bladud continued to lie on the earth like a sack of potatoes. One evening I even started meditating with him. Yes, this is how low I had sunk. I took out my ancient meditation cushion, and I went back to sitting meditation. I held Bladud in my lap and forced myself to endure the kind of aching legs I used to practice, in those would-be satori years before I started to realize how harmful sitting meditation was to my health. I guess I was hoping that if I did create a meditative space in my life, the Great Mystical Solution to Spiritually Liberated Upwardness would somehow appear. Janet, I don't need to tell you how successful this was.

This ridiculous nonsense took up a whole winter. By the time winter turned into spring, I was desperate. The warm weather had arrived and the nights were perfect for flying, but I was as stuck on the ground as ever. What else did I need to do? I had created the perfect broom, I was practicing spiritual self-reliance, and I understood the values of perception, surrender, and communion, but I seemed to be at a dead end. Wait a minute. What did I mean, dead end? At this point I reminded myself that there are no dead ends in nature. In the natural world every ending is always a new beginning. Regeneration is as much a part of nature as is death. This led me to the interesting idea that maybe the secret about the broom would not come from the broom itself but from nature. Maybe I would have better luck if I started to focus on what I could see and hear in the natural world around me. It occurred to me that this might have been the upwardness secret of medieval witches. They would have been much more concerned with focusing on the rhythms of the natural world than the shape or size of a broomstick. You had to watch the world carefully in those days, or else you didn't survive. Also the artists and poets whom I most admired, the one who seemed to know how to live with the greatest intensity, had inevitably focused their perceptions not on human civilization but on the natural world around them. Henry David Thoreau had only to step out of doors to get a sense of cosmic consciousness, and Emily Brontë needed nothing but the Yorkshire moors to see into the spiritual heart of nature.

I immediately decided that my attempts to get the upwardness secret out of the broom had been folly. It was time to modify my transparent eyeball ambitions. I had to forget about getting a great big fat mystical vision, the kind that Catholic or Sufi saints could seemingly induce without much effort. Instead I had to turn my attention to the natural world around me. In other words, turn myself into a nature mystic. I had already learned that the more closely you observe natural objects, even a leaf of grass or a grain of sand, the more intricate and mysterious they seem. If I truly began to pay attention to the secrets of nature, I would surely find the solution to upwardness. Communing with Bladud, trying to surrender to Bladud . . . no wonder it hadn't worked. What I needed to seek out was the hidden spiritual reality of the natural world.

And herein lies another tale. To be continued.

Mona

* * *

June 24

So my favorite niece (mainly since she's my only niece) immediately emails me back with: "And herein lies another tale of delusion, bad guesses, wrong turns, and totally dork behavior." Alas, how well you know me.

Well, yes, what I'm going to do now is describe what you so succinctly describe as totally dork behavior. But don't fret—this time it gets amusing. The main stupidity at this juncture was that I was certain things were going to be easy. After all, how difficult could it be to turn yourself into a nature mystic? What with the way I tended my plants and watched the light, maybe I had already claimed the nature mystic prize, even if I was not yet a certified Emersonian eyeball. The idea that some kind of truth or spirituality can be found in the natural world was what had led me into the Neo-Pagan movement in the first place. Nature mysticism is the oldest kind of mysticism there is. Chinese Daoists were inundated with it; they had always seen the natural world as radiant with a spiritual significance which could be understood and communicated. So if I followed in their footsteps, maybe some kind of shift would occur, and spiritual liberation into upwardness would be mine. It had become a case of look out Mother Nature—here I come!

But as usual there was a problem, one that I kept running into time and again. The eternal how-to-do-it problem. While there have been plenty of nature mystics throughout history, none has ever left any practical instructions. What they inevitably recorded were accounts of what happened to them when they had the experience, not what they did to induce it in the first place. This was in spite of the fact that over the centuries the greatest visionaries had always seem to generate their mystical experiences without the slightest effort. What were they doing that I couldn't copy?

I pondered the problem for several weeks. Since the ancient Chinese Daoists seemed to have acquired their mystical sensibilities with the least amount of effort, I started dutifully studying books on Daoist thought. The records of Daoist thinkers weren't very helpful, but you will be interested to hear that the writings of Daoist painters did provide some welcome insight. In all of world history there has never been a group of painters more spiritually-minded than the Daoists. Before taking up the brush, good Daoist artists would go out into the natural world and lose themselves in whatever surrounded them. This helped them develop their sense of kinship with nature to such an extent that they could easily let go of their self-conscious egos. Chinese paintings frequently portray elderly scholars sitting on the edge of precipices or lost in the mists, entirely at one with the spectacular natural environment that surrounds them. Man, mountains, trees, air, light, water . . . all seem to partake of the same natural essence, and all are existing in harmony. If you want to see what nature mysticism looks like, take a look at a classic Chinese painting.

Here I must add that I have always liked the idea of the Chinese sage living a solitary life in his hut in the mountains. If ever there were human beings dwelling in flawless harmony with the natural world, it would have to be those wise men and women who retired from civilization so they could purify their souls by becoming one with nature. Chinese sages were famous for spending their days contemplating the lotus or the branches of the willow, which sounds like perfect transparent eyeball harmony to me. No Cartesian duality between body and mind in these people, let alone a sense that a Creator exists apart from his creation. They were living in a universe where everything existed in perfect concord. But did they leave any how-to directions? Do you even have to ask? The more I studied the Daoists, the more frustrated I became. I started to wonder if what I needed to do was read Chinese in the original, but this didn't seem practical. In spite of my love affair with the English language, there were still too many English words whose meanings I had not yet plummeted. I would need several hundred years if I wanted to understand the Chinese language as well, and several hundred years was time that I didn't have.

Then it occurred to me that I needed to study something with which I was more familiar, namely the British Romantic poets. The Chinese Daoists weren't the only ones who immersed themselves in nature—the British Romantics also had the knack. If you ask me, there has never been any group of people who have exhibited the kind of visionary genius that the great Brits have always shown. This isn't something that most people realize, especially since the only encounter they ever get with the British poets is having them shoved down their throats in high school. A pity. They don't understand that nothing can enrich your life like the melody and the sensitivity to nature which you can find in the greatest British poets. For some reason the British Isles have a tendency to produce in generation after generation the most dazzling natural visionaries and mystics. If there is any place on the planet where some kind of divinely harmonious interaction between human beings and nature truly exists, it happens most frequently in Britain.

You can find nature mysticism everywhere in English poetry, starting off with Chaucer and Shakespeare. It's there in the great 17^th century metaphysical poets, and in the early 19^th century Romantics, most of whom couldn't put pen to paper without recording some kind of visionary experience. You also find it in the Pre-Raphaelites, in Gerald Manley Hopkins, who saw divine "indwelling" everywhere he looked, and in solid Victorian monuments like Tennyson and Browning. You can even find it in lesser known writers like Christopher Smart, Arthur Machen, Kathleen Raine, and Richard Jeffries. Of course it's everywhere in Emily Brontë, who wrote some of the most explicitly mystical verse ever penned. I've even found a sense of nature mysticism in places where I don't expect to see it: in the legends of Robin Hood, or in books like The Natural History of Selborne, Isaak Walton's The Compleat Angler, The Closet of Sir Kenelme Digby Opened (a 17^th century book of herbal recipes), Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, The Lord of the Rings, the cookbooks of Elizabeth David, Dr. Edward Bach's flower remedies, and the current crop of Harry Potter books. You can even hear traces of it in the Beatles, who are hoping to take you away, to strawberry fields forever. Take a Brit, let him or her outdoors, and presumably a huge percentage of them can immediately lose themselves in mystical vision.

So why the heck does this keep happening in Britain? Why are the British lucky enough to possess this tendency? Is it what they eat—fish and chips maybe? Or is it the herbs that they cultivate? The three great Brit plants are mint, lavender, and rosemary, but heck, we have those on this side of the pond, too. Maybe it's the British love of animals? Picnics? Gardening? The mild maritime climate? Their mastery of ships and the sea? The fact that the whole island seems to be riddled with ghosts and fairies? Maybe it's the British sense of humor? We've heard of Merrie England, but nobody talks about Merrie Sweden or Merrie Portugal. Or perhaps it's their tendency to rebel against authority? The English were the first people in medieval Europe to stand up against a divine-right monarch, and you already know what I think about rebels.

The only explanation that makes any sense is the idea of the maritime climate. Nobody in the British Isles ever fears heat indexes, wind chill factors, whiteouts, earthquakes, or tornadoes. You can go outdoors practically any day of the year without expecting the weather to clobber you. Also I doubt that the green world is as tremendously, lusciously, and eternally green as it is in the British Isles. Here in the Midwest the world glows like the rarest of emeralds for a few precious weeks in early spring, but the colors fade as soon as the summer heat arrives. Britain never gets that kind of heat. It stays greenly luminescent most of the year. Maybe that overwhelming greenness does something to generate heightened perception. Ah, yes—back we go to the idea of heightened perception. The one thing of which I am quite certain is the importance of perception. Eternal greenness doesn't count as much as your ability to be aware of the world around you. No kind of vision, let alone mystical, is going to happen unless you make an effort to see. Daily life can provide us with all the cosmic meaning we need if we just sit up and take notice of it. Maybe this was the only thing that the Brits needed to spur them on to visionary genius. Keep their focus eternally sharp and alert.

I finally decided that if I wanted to be a nature mystic, I had to start paying the most intense and vigilant attention to whatever I could see or hear in my own part of the universe. Why should my environment be any less revelatory than the mountains of a Sung poet or the lakes of a British Romantic? I didn't even think it was necessary to find some spectacular natural scenery for true mystical vision. Why do you need the woods if you've got a tree? Do you even need a tree? The only thing that the German mystic Jacob Böhme needed for mystical revelation was a glimpse of water in a pewter dish. William Blake needed even less—he found the World in a grain of sand. If you're paying attention, a single tree framed against the sky can be more revelatory than a whole forest.

So if I started to pay attention to my good old American backyard, the secret to upwardness might very well be mine. Your backyard is supposed to be the place to find all the answers, remember. And Emerson tells us that "the invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common".[46] Well, nothing gets more common than my backyard, which is the understatement of the century. I have always been vastly fond of my plot of earth. I keep it reasonably neat, I tend my various gardens with considerable care, and I never tire of the way it looks under different kinds of light, nor of its scents and its colors. Just working in my yard had already provided me with limitless riches, even if it hadn't given me any secrets about broom ignition and liftoff. I decided that if I started to investigate my own backyard with as much diligence as I could muster, my Bladud problem would be a problem no longer.

Mind you, I was aware that this would be an enormously painstaking effort. I would have to examine the manifestations of nature in my yard with as much diligence as if I were scrutinizing a Persian miniature or a Chinese scroll. My eyes would have to see the world with the kind of clear lucidity that the greatest painters have always had, and my ears were going to have to listen to every single natural sound around me, no matter how trivial. I would have to sense the air whenever I took a breath, and I would need to feel the earth beneath my feet as I walked. Most importantly I would have to pay attention to the little things going on around me, the kind of unimportant trifles that most of us never notice. Nothing escapes the eyes and ears of a good visionary poet, and nothing was going escape me. I was going to go on red alert to everything that I encountered, up to the extreme limit of my consciousness.

I also decided that I would take things as slowly as possible. I realized that I would need to devote the whole upcoming summer for this work, which meant that I would turn it into the slowest summer of my life. In other words, the process would exhibit none of the urban rush which normally constitutes my existence. Slow looking, slow hearing, and slow living moment by moment. Mona in July would present an even more glacial spectacle than molasses in January. I would still go to work every day, but everything else about my existence would be purest lethargy. I also decided that I would forget about movies, television, shopping, restaurants, and other diversions; if I wanted to relax, I would sit down and read a book, specifically one written by one of the great British visionaries. And I decided to forgo my normal American diet of peanut butter, sourdough bread, and tofu chili. Instead I would consume nothing but organic Limey: strawberries, puddings, curds, gooseberry fools, trifles, crumpets, cucumber sandwiches, and apples. I would most especially allow myself to pig out on apples. Apples have always been some kind of supreme mystical fruit, so an apple a day might very well keep the self-conscious ego away.

And then . . . if I could finally start to see the natural world around me with a new freshness of vision, perhaps I would finally be able to perceive something of its inner reality. I remembered that the Latin term for poet, vates, also means prophet or seer. A poet is one who sees spiritually, I guess. This was all I needed, and once I managed it, the epiphanies would surely start piling up like the empty beer cans in my last boyfriend's garage. I told myself I was on the verge of one of the most liberating experiences of my life. Everything was set. The backyard was beckoning. It was spring, the best time of the year to start a new project, and the earth was brimming with vitality. Never had I felt so alert, never had I sensed more aliveness in the world which surrounded me. Some kind of mystical union between my own consciousness and the green world that surrounded me was about to become mine. I was confident that my Magical Mystical Summer would produce the necessary result by August at the earliest, and I would be able to celebrate Labor Day by taking to the prairie skies, upward at last.

You can probably guess what happened next.

Mona

* * *

July 1

Janet, have you lost your marbles? What do you mean that last night you dreamed I had grown a green moustache? And I was doing what exactly? Surfing on the Mississippi River? With a real California surfboard? Well, it sounds quite delightful, but not quite my style. I don't think a surf board would work too well on a river, not even one as majestic as the Mississippi. I prefer my recreation to be much more metaphysically sophisticated. And no—I don't want you to paint my portrait with the aforementioned moustache. Why don't you cast your eyes on the wonder and glory of the natural world around you and find inspiration there? We were talking about nature mysticism, remember? Specifically the Magical Mystical Summer my precious backyard was going to give me the upwardness answers that I needed. This is the whole point of my emails, remember. Don't you want to hear what kind of mystical secrets I got out of my very own backyard?

Well . . . you must again brace yourself. We've got a rocky road ahead of us.

It was a beautiful April morning when I set forth on my quest. I was rested, my mind was clear, the sun was shining, the dew was glistening, and the air was stuffing my nostrils with the most incredible freshness. It could have been a perfectly Brit morning, so nothing was going to stop me from turning into a mystical Brit. With expectations as high as a television antenna, I stepped forth into my backyard, ready to let the wonders of cosmic reality wash over me. And what do you suppose my crystal-clear visionary eyes immediately saw? Well, never mind what it was exactly, but I will tell you what I started thinking, namely, "Why does Ralph do this to me when he gets both a morning and an evening walk?"

Yes, there was evidence right on the ground in front of me that Ralph Had Been There. Why was I surprised? Ralph is the canine monarch of the property, and every square inch of it is his territory to do with as he pleases. And here I was, determined to pay attention to the ordinary in order to acquire mystical vision. Well, more ordinary than this it doesn't get. So what kind of metaphysical vision cascaded over me as I made a careful sidestep? What kind of grand revelation announced itself? What kind of Ultimate Secret of the Universe that neither the Tibetans nor the Egyptians ever figured out was there before me? Never mind.

I bypassed the relic of Ralph and proceeded into the yard. I had taken only a few more steps before my visionary eyes observed a dandelion. Now I happen to love dandelions. I love them especially during those few days in April when the entire earth is covered with gorgeous yellow spots. I also love eating dandelion greens and adding the dried roots to my herbal teas (no better blood purifier exists). People who don't like dandelions don't know what they are missing, namely the world's greatest plant. Here right before my visionary eyes was a dandelion in its stupendous glory. So I stop to observe the dandelion and . . . so what happened? Well, it was a sweet little dandelion. It had already bloomed. Its flower was a healthy yellow color. I paused, I observed, and I waited for mystical insight to wash over me. I waited a long time. A very, very long time. It pains me to recollect this idiocy. I finally told myself that I wasn't doing it right and that I needed to try a different, more mystical plant.

So I moved on. Right next to the dandelion was a plantain. Not as large as the dandelion, but it was a perfectly decent plant. I stopped to observe the plantain, and . . . Well, okay, I moved on again, and then stopped to observe another dandelion. And . . . nothing. Sure I was observing as carefully as I could, but heck, all I was seeing were some idiot weeds, and it looked like the lawn would need mowing next weekend, and I had to remember to buy oil for the mower the next time I stopped at the store, and the car needed vacuuming . . . I found myself getting irritated. I was certain I was doing everything exactly right, but some nature mystic I was proving to be.

I finally gave up on the weeds and sat down on the bench beside my herb garden. I remembered that I was going to devote the whole summer to this project so I couldn't expect results right away. It occurred to me to forget what I was seeing and concentrate on what I was hearing instead. And what was that? Well, some idiot down the street was cutting branches, so the enchanting hum of a buzz saw resounded in my ears. Then came a train whistle and the sound of a mile-long freight train rolling through town. As always I could hear the sound of the vehicles from the Interstate, plus the roar of pickups in the street. It was Saturday morning, and all the internal combustion engines in Carver, Illinois were going at full blast. I tried to force down my irritation and remind myself that this was a perfect morning in April. So what if there was also a lot of racket? I had to stop identifying what I was hearing and let whatever was happening happen. Then I realized that all around me melodious birds were singing madrigals. Who cared about a lousy buzz saw when you could listen to exquisite birdsong like that?

So for a few minutes I did nothing but listen to the birds. As always whenever I stopped to listen to them, I was delighted. But then more irritating thoughts started leaping into my unenlightened head. So I was listening to the birds? So what? I'd been listening to the birds my whole life. And what is a birdsong except just another darn birdsong? There is no mystical revelation behind it. It is nothing but a common sound made a zillion times a day. I started to wonder that if I tracked one of these birds down, found its nest, and started interacting with it in some way . . . would I then be able to merge my consciousness with it? Now here's brilliance for you. If I couldn't merge with a broom, how the heck was I going to do it with a bird? What was I expecting anyway? One of these birds to start speaking Ye Olde Englishe to me?

Needless to say, the rest of the day passed in complete failure. As did the day after that, and the next. As the weeks started to go by, I continued to make my daily pilgrimage into the backyard, but I never saw or heard anything that might give me a clue into the spiritual side of nature. The only pleasant thing to report in this folly was the enjoyment I got from sitting and doing nothing in the yard. It was almost like a fun version of Zen sitting meditation. I got to rest comfortably on my bench and do nothing except appreciate the suchness of my backyard. This was not my idea of penance. However, mystical vision remained as remote as Tasmania. The birds continued to serenade me and the leaves unfolded in their richness, but that was about it. I told myself I had to be patient, but as the weeks started piling up, I couldn't help growing frustrated. Of course I didn't spend every hour of every weekend just sitting on the bench. I continued to weed the garden, mow the lawn, and do my other chores. And when the gooseberries were ripe I made myself a delicious little fool. Fool for the fool.

But then—a breakthrough! One afternoon it occurred to me that what mattered wasn't the backyard so much as the garden part of it. I realized that there isn't such a tremendous gulf between the human and the natural in a garden, particularly a garden which you have created yourself. Observing the weeds or listening to the birds was all very well, but the garden was a special part of the yard. Over the centuries gardens have frequently been the site of mystical experiences, especially in Britain where huge numbers of Brits have apparently managed to get a full-blown otherworldly punch. In a garden, the scents, colors, breezes, and light can sometimes come together in strange and supernatural ways. If the Brits could get something portentous out of a garden, why not me?

Then it struck me that flowers were possibly the key to nature mysticism. It was true that I hadn't gotten much of anything out of a dandelion, but let's face it, dandelions aren't the ultimate floral apex. I remembered that everything about a flower contains immense potential for mystical illumination. The most deeply spiritual individuals in both East and West have always been associated in one way or another with flowers, from the Buddha who held up a flower to symbolize his teaching, Hindu sages who spent hours contemplating the lotus, and Sufi mystics who found the entire universe in a rose. When van Gogh wanted to paint the essence of the life force, he painted sunflowers. I wondered if there might be something about flowers which could provide me with a key to the spiritual reality of nature. I had already realized that in their harmonious movements and radiant beauty, everything about a flower seems to emanate some kind of mystical essence. If you ever start contemplating flowers, you can find yourself in a new kind of joyous reality. Flowers exhibit what is without question the greatest beauty of any physical being. Flowers also possess a sense of calmness, the kind of stillness where you sense that energy is flowing harmoniously. Maybe this demonstrates their greatest meaning, namely that for all their beauty and stillness they are in constant movement, just like the universe itself. They follow the light of the sun and the moon even more carefully than animals do. If you start watching the movements of a flower, you can easily see the only true reality we ever know, the unfoldment of our moments in all their richness. In other words, flowers tell us once again that hell, as always, is stasis.

The great spiritual systems are always telling us that all things are interconnected, and flowers have got to be the most visible symbol of this interconnection. After all, it's easier to sense a connection of your own inner being with a flower than with a rock or a tree. And you can't be a shrill self-absorbed ego if you know how to commune with flowers. There is a story of a medieval Japanese empress who didn't think she was worthy enough to touch flowers. Now here's a real nature mystic for you, someone who understood the essence of metaphysical reality. A human being who honors the sublimity of a flower knows everything there is to know about spiritual truth.

I remembered that what matters with flowers is not so much their beauty and fragrance as their ultimate goal, which is to produce seeds. The flower happens so that the seed can happen. If you're a gardener, you know that few things matter as much as seeds—coaxing a seed into life is the penultimate gardening skill. But the interesting thing about seeds is that there is nothing in nature that seems as dead as a seed. It is a speck of dry tissue that looks like a lifeless corpse. All living beings continually move and unfold, but a seed just sits there doing nothing. Nothing is ever as full of life as a flower, but nothing ever seems as dead as a seed. Nevertheless, all the energies of the plant are contained within a flower's seeds. If you give your seeds the right kind of soil, moisture, and warmth, you will soon have new life and form coming into being. Every plant is always born again in its seeds. If flowers and seeds can give me any kind of metaphysical lesson, it's one that is very simple—namely that all life inevitably leads on to more life, to regeneration, and to wondrous new existence.

But the heck with that. Flowers and seeds . . . yes, I suppose I was acquiring some pleasant insights, but they were hardly conducive to upwardness. I doubted that one single human being in world history had ever used a zinnia to get airborne. I could try to merge with all the flowers on the planet, I could contemplate seeds for the rest of my days, but none of these trivialities were going to get me off the ground. Achieving my goal seemed as impossible as ever. Needless to say, by the end of June I was hopelessly stuck. I had spent a good six weeks trying to force some kind of mystical experience, but nothing had happened. I had to admit the brutal truth—not only was I a dysfunctional witch and a dysfunctional victim, I was rapidly turning into a dysfunctional transparent eyeball. That there was spiritual knowledge sufficing the natural world I still did not doubt. But trying to discover it in my backyard wasn't working. Something more was needed.

So here we are again, back at the obvious word. It was obvious what.

Mona

* * *

July 7

All right. I'll try not to use the word again. Even better—this time I won't make you wait before I reveal my next breathtaking insight.

So what was obvious this time? The answer is so simple that it hurts. Janet, you must understand that I was beginning to think that a backyard wasn't necessary for my spiritual purposes. There have been plenty of visionaries throughout history who didn't need a yard or a garden to induce mystical vision. The green world is only part of the physical universe that surrounds us. We are also surrounded at all times by the physical elements which constitute our reality—elements such as wind, rain, stone, sea, earth, storms, stars, rivers, snow, desert . . . the list could go on forever. I decided that paying attention to these kinds of natural elements might make more sense than anything I could observe in my garden. I had already discovered how the act of watching the light had started to enrich my life. You don't need a backyard to experience natural elements like light or clouds, wind, or rain. You just need to be a living human being who possesses enough sense to pay attention to the energies around you. This is something that can be done anywhere, even in the most dismal part of a modern urban jungle.

I read somewhere that the words for natural elements such as thunder, star, fire, and night are some of the oldest expressions in the Indo-European languages. Primitive human beings wanted to name the elements before they named anything else. This is enough to tell you what kind of impact natural forces can have upon us poor mortals, an impact that continues to this day. Any element that's primordial, free, and overwhelming will always have a tremendous impression upon us paltry humans, whether pre-historic cave-dwellers or post-modern dot-commers. During the weeks when I was sitting in my backyard, I realized that the elemental energies which surrounded me were having a much greater impression on my consciousness than the basil and the nasturtiums. Feeling the wind, breathing the air, experiencing the sharpness of the cold or the heaviness of the heat—that's usually what you notice when you're outdoors.

Now I am aware that there are millions of people in this world who never give a thought to the elements of our physical world. We live in a culture where these forces do not matter unless they turn into an irritant or a danger. But how impoverished must be the consciousness which never pays attention to natural forces or forms. Says the medieval Chinese poet Li Bai: "We never tire of looking at each other/Only the mountain and I".[47] This is my idea of a truly enriching relationship, one that you've established with a natural phenomenon. And if you keep interacting with your phenomenon of choice, you will discover that you're living in a fabulous new reality where your life is continually being stimulated and energized. The greatest poets have understood this for millennia, every last one from Homer to Sylvia Plath. Show me a poet who has no appreciation for the natural elements, and I'll show you a pretty dismal poet.

Also there is no danger of getting trapped in stasis when you let the natural elements become part of your life. You need to remember that the elemental world around us is never predictable; it is always indefinite, irregular, and full of surprises. Every day its energies are constantly changing and transforming. If you make time to observe their perpetual movements, you will find them endlessly fascinating. Have you ever paid much attention to a thunderstorm? Or the dew on the grass, or the sparkling glitter of running water, or the clouds soaring through infinite space? Who needs theology, let alone a lousy meditation cushion, when you can experience planetary glory like this? Even if you only pay attention to the changes that come with the seasons, you will find yourself in a different kind of reality. Emily Dickinson was so enraptured by the seasons that she considered them sacraments ("Oh, sacrament of summer days").[48] Gerard Manley Hopkins saw them as part of one rhythmic mystical whole. You can never experience too many natural elements. And there is no such thing as a boring spring dawn or an uninteresting winter snowfall.

I suppose what I'm preaching here is a Zen kind of thing, without the relentless derriere passivity. You simply need to maintain a beginner's mind whenever you encounter some kind of natural form, and you need to encounter it without thought, word, or analysis. This is yet another way to live your life to the fullest: by paying attention to the primordial forms in the natural world around you. This also happens to be the best therapy in the world, worth infinitely more than all the shrinks and/or tranquilizers on the market. Janet, I'm sure you remember what I think of co-dependence, namely that it is a one way ticket to the ultimate in human misery. But I don't see anything wrong about getting co-dependent about a natural form or element, such as a star or a sunset or a river. Try falling in love with a natural element, and you will find yourself in a relationship which will never go wrong. The elements will never let you down the way people do, or the way your religious system can let you down.

In recent years I have spent a lot of time rereading Shakespeare's final plays, especially Cymbeline, Pericles, and The Tempest. I find these plays to be particularly interesting in what they say about the natural elements. After delineating the human capacity for evil in his tragedies, Shakespeare shows us an entirely new vision of earthly existence in his last plays. What is interesting is that this vision is dominated not by human civilization but by the natural elements. Towards the end of his life Shakespeare did not turn to theology or philosophy for consolation, but to the natural forces which surrounded him, to tempests, seas, and stars. His characters no longer interact with each other as much as they relate to natural forces, where there is a limitless potential for renewal. Shakespeare hears only the sound of regeneration in the sea and the winds. No imprisoning theological speculation here, just a vision of the liberating power of natural manifestations. There is all the difference in the world between the catastrophic world-view of Hamlet (1605), and the radiant potential for redemption presented in Antony and Cleopatra (1606). The central image in Hamlet is the human skull, alas poor idiot Yorick, the fate of us animated skeletons who will inevitably end up as bones in the earth, no matter what we manage to accomplish in our lives. At the end of Hamlet, flocks of angels are allegedly accompanying our hero to his rest, but you don't feel like cheering, to say the least. But a play like Antony and Cleopatra depicts an entirely different picture of human potential. The play is saturated with elemental energies and natural forces: sun, earth, water, sea, and clouds, all of which are endlessly dissolving, blending, merging, and transforming. The union of Antony and Cleopatra is presented as the mating of the sun and the Nile. And the central image of Antony and Cleopatra is the serpent. Guess what Cleopatra calls herself? The "serpent of Old Nile".[49] And guess how she commits suicide? A helpful poisonous snake, which is presented as an image of new life: "Dost thou not see my baby at my breast"?[50] And guess what happens when "a strange serpent" dies? Says Antony: "It lives by that which nourisheth it, and the elements once out of it, it transmigrates".[51]

Forget the lifeless human skull—a serpent transmigrates. Reincarnation, no less. The movement of a soul from one earthly body to another. The Oxford English Dictionary tells me that Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra contains the first recorded use in the English language where the word "transmigrates" means reincarnation. After the horrors Shakespeare shows us in Hamlet, he is now seeing something beyond the finality of the grave. He is giving us a potential for new life, even though it's not an existence to be lived in the heavenly Jerusalem. Once he started to contemplate the natural elements, Shakespeare threw Christian eschatology out the window. The elements which surrounded him were enough to give him the spiritual sustenance he needed. They helped him to move into a new and redemptive kind of reality, where a serpent does not become a skeleton in the earth. It reincarnates. It is reborn into a more wondrous earthly existence.

Shakespeare also presents the natural elements as living beings in his late plays. The day frowns, the moon gazes, the sea mocks, the stars watch. Was this just lyrical effect, or did Shakespeare, with his acute poetic sensibility, manage to perceive something about the consciousness inherent in natural forces which us ordinary mortals don't quite get? More interestingly, in The Tempest we even get humanoid characters who are themselves walking and talking natural elements, as in Ariel of the air or Caliban of the earth (and how much more interesting are these elemental beings than a couple of dorks like Miranda and Ferdinand). It is also interesting that Shakespeare doesn't perceive the elements as being alive; he shows us some kind of Divinity overseeing them. However, this Divinity isn't exactly Jehovah sitting on a throne in the sky. It is a kind of Divinity that can only be sensed, if never articulated, through natural forces. Prospero's island also seems to have some kind of direct link to the Divine, floating as it does somewhere between water and air as if it had discovered the secret to upwardness, which as you know is a subject that I find interesting. Like anything else that floats, the island is a place of mystical vision, and enhanced vision is something that happens to virtually all of the characters in the play. One other interesting thing about The Tempest is that all its characters want to be free. Not wise, not powerful, not saved, not rich—just free. The word occurs repeatedly throughout the play and is Prospero's final word. Through the natural elements into liberty.

So we can conclude that Shakespeare found a potential for spiritual redemption—and spiritual liberation—by meditating on the natural elements. He wasn't the only Brit poet to do so, of course. You can find similar ideas throughout British poetry, particularly in the Romantics, Shelley's Prometheus Unbound being the classic example. And what do you find in Wuthering Heights but page after page of human beings interacting with the elements: night, blizzards, moors. Emily's hero is himself a force of nature, heath and cliff, as his name suggests. Normal social interactions count for less than nothing in the world of Wuthering Heights, where Christian dogma is constantly ridiculed. The novel ends in a graveyard, but you don't start thinking about lifeless skulls in the earth. You get a sense of rightness and of some kind of vital reunion or even redemption. "The Earth that wakes one human heart to feeling can center both the worlds of heaven and hell," says Emily in one of her poems.[52] She went to the natural elements of the earth for her spirituality, and she found it.

I have already talked about the value of surrender, of lessening your ego, and of dissolving into perception. This is a zillion times easier when you let yourself surrender to a natural element. Trying to merge with a broomstick is one thing, but letting your ego dissolve into a snowstorm or a mountain is something else altogether. Focus your attention on something vast and eternal, and it is infinitely easier for the distinction between self and object to disappear. This is one of the best ways to truly expand your consciousness—by giving yourself up to one of the elemental forces of the earth. And lo and behold, whenever this happens, that nuisance of a self-conscious ego does seem to diminish, even if it doesn't altogether disappear. Let us not forget that it's only when you lose yourself that you can find yourself. When the boundaries start to dissolve, there is nothing in the universe which is not your own being.

All of which means, once again, that we can decipher the spiritual meaning of the natural elements which surround us if—as always—we only pay attention. Every single spiritual quality which has been attributed to assorted divine concepts over the years can be found in elemental forces: power, timelessness, immenseness, and creation. If you want to find Divinity, you will get a better sense of it if you turn to a natural element like the wind or the clouds instead of spending years studying all the tortured theological speculation ever penned. In Une Vie by Guy de Maupassant, he states that there are only three things in creation which are beautiful: light, space, and water.[53] This idea has stuck in my mind since one way or another these miraculous elements are always part of our lives. So, Janet my dear, if you want to find mystical vision, one of the first things you need to do is start contemplating the natural elements. Happily this is about as effortless as it gets. How much effort does it take, after all, to pay attention to sunrises or snowfalls, rivers or earth? Go climb a mountain, stand on the seashore, walk out onto a prairie field, or lift your chin 45 degrees and look at the stars. The potential for interaction will be there. Just make sure you're paying attention to what is before you with as much intensity as you can manage. Then if you can let go of your conscious thought, who knows? The natural forces that surround you might start to glow with spiritual meaning.

And if you're puzzled about where to start . . . well, what could be more direct and elemental than the light? Light, remember, is my favorite element and the one which provided me with my biggest metaphysical breakthrough. Light has been synonymous with Divinity throughout the ages, which means, I suppose, that when you pay attention to the light, you are perceiving something divine. Light has also meant immortality and regeneration in most cultures from time immemorial. Plain ordinary sunlight has got to be one of the greatest natural elements we can experience. Certainly every time I notice a particular ray of the sun, whether it is shining through the clouds or spilling through a window, it seems to be a living force. Who needs Buddhist enlightenment anyway, when you've got the light from the sun coming at you nearly every day? And there is nothing as bedazzling as the radiance of sunlight upon water, which has got to be the ultimate of earthly light. No jewel in the world can compare to it, which is something that Thoreau understood when he called Walden a lake of rainbow light.[54] If you want to know what Divinity looks like, forget about the guy on the ceiling in Italy and take a look at sunlight on water. Any kind of water will do, from the Pacific Ocean to the nearest mud puddle. Heck, you don't even need a mud puddle—the light shining in a drop of dew will work perfectly as well.

In recent years I've also discovered that the sky has provided me with as much revelation as has the light. The wonderful thing about the sky is that anyone can have it. Long before I took to the air on my broom, I was a sky watcher, finding infinite delight in the endless variety of atmospheric combinations you could discover there. "To see the Summer Sky/Is Poetry, though never in a Book it lie—" says Emily Dickinson, accurate as always.[55] Start paying attention to the sky, and your days will no longer possess a deadening sameness. What is constantly going on the sky above our heads is a perfect example of energy as it eternally flows, energy which you can both see and feel. Which means that the endless drama in the sky can become the best lesson we can ever get on unstuckedness.

And don't forget the wind that comes to us out of the sky. Have you ever bothered just to sense the wind, to feel it, or listen to it? Or do you take it for granted as a perfectly natural—and completely uninteresting—phenomenon of nature? I learned long ago that the wind has many metaphysical secrets to reveal. Since it's an elemental experience that is valuable only when you hear it or feel it, it can be especially illuminating. It's infinitely variable music is forever surprising. I don't know if other parts of the world experience the kind of prairie winds we get here in Illinois, but our winds are winds to be worshipped, even in January. My guess is that winds all over the world are like that. The Romantic poets used the wind over and over again as a symbol of creative inspiration. They realized that in its boundlessness, its freedom, it movement, the wind is something which can give us the essence of spiritual renewal.

And the stars have got to be the most supreme awe-inspiring glory of the whole universe. I have often wondered why so few people bother to look at the stars. You can find Divinity in sunlight, but if you want to know what Eternity looks like, take a look at the stars. Spend an entire night with them if you can, watching them move silently across the sky. You will find yourself communing with the ultimate in spiritual beauty—not even flowers can compare with their magnificence. And don't forget that the stars are elements which are always in motion—which means, I suppose, that Eternity itself must also be constantly on the move. Their mysterious progression, occurring as it does in the vast blackness of the night, always seems to be so much more peaceful, so much more representative of the timeless, than does the daily journey of the sun. The stars can give us a good lesson in the Zen idea of goal-less living, for there is no purpose to their movement, just an eternal majestic procession each and every night.

I will never understand the kind of human being who thinks that happiness comes from money or possessions or the right partner. Happiness comes when you can experience something with primal intensity. You don't need a certain famous weed to alter your consciousness. You simply need to get stoned on the air or the sun or the great silent movements of the stars. But you have to really get into it. Shallow awareness makes for shallow sensation. They say that living on an island is highly desirable because you are much more aware of the elements that surround you, especially the element of water. But the natural elements surround us everywhere at all times and places, and we have only to notice them to be revitalized by them. Heathcliff wasn't exactly a shallow sort of guy, to put it mildly. That's one thing to remember about the natural elements, namely that shallowness isn't possible. Start paying attention to the natural elements, and what you will get is the most colossal intensity you can ever experience.

Not that I had figured any of this out when I was still thrashing around during my magical mystical summer. Yes, I was paying attention to the natural elements, but the idea that they might give me some kind of spiritual revelation had not yet occurred to me. Then I realized that something was missing. Sky, light, sun, clouds, wind, night . . . they were all very well, but they weren't getting me off the ground. I realized that if I wanted to solve my upwardness problem, I had to come back to earth. Earth and three other things.

Mona

* * *

July 19

That is to say, earth and air and fire and water. The four primal elements of classical Greek thought.

Janet, here again I must momentarily digress. I am aware that you are currently experiencing the American system of higher education, which means that you are learning less than nothing about what really matters in life. But I also know that you are intelligent enough to pursue knowledge for its own sake, even though you have probably never paid much attention to the old concept of the four elements. After all, the idea of dividing physical reality into earth, air, fire and water seems so retro these days, especially since modern science tells us that there are more than a hundred identifiable chemical elements in our physical universe.

Well, bear with me for a while, since I am convinced that some kind of truth can be found in the ancient Greek notion of the four elements. The idea that you could divide matter into four manifestations or energies was originally promulgated by the pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles and was later refined by Aristotle. They felt that the elements of earth, air, fire, and water were the vital forces of life and that all the physical objects of our world were somehow correlated with them. However, it is misleading to think that the Greeks were referring to simple physical manifestations whenever they talked about the four elements. These elements were instead felt to be spiritual forces working through matter. They were perhaps even regarded as the point of connection between physical and spiritual reality. This idea of dividing the manifestations of our world into four categories subsequently impacted Western scientific thought right into the modern world. You can also find many other cultures throughout history, including those of ancient India and pre-Columbian America, who interpreted physical reality in this fashion. The idea of dividing reality into four distinct patterns has made an awful lot of sense to an awful lot of people throughout human history, up to and including your affectionate broom-flying aunt.

Of course modern physics has a different view of physical reality—or does it? I have read that the most abundant elements in the universe (carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen) seem in many ways to parallel the ancient conceptions of earth, air, fire and water. Modern physics also tells us that matter is manifested in four different states: solid, gas, plasma and liquid, which is another parallel. Most interestingly, quantum physics tells us that there are four basic forces in the universe: strong nuclear force, weak nuclear force, gravity, and electromagnetism. Which means that contemporary physicists are dividing energy into four categories just like the ancient Greeks. So is it so outrageous to suggest that when the Greeks were talking about water as an elemental force, they were referring to what they could sense, for example, about electromagnetic energy?

What is also interesting about the natural world is that there are fours everywhere you look, including the four seasons and the four directions. On a primordial level, the number four, with its connotations of squareness and stability, is an image of completeness. Fours can also be found in many other facets of our existence, including that of our beings—the old idea of the four elements of man being the body, the mind, the spirit, and the soul. Whenever something is balanced and unified, it frequently exhibits some kind of symbolic fourness. North, south, east, west . . . spring, summer, winter, fall . . . body, mind, emotions, spirit . . . fourness always means something which is whole.

This makes me conclude that there is something valid, even if I can't say exactly what, about the idea of the four elements. Janet, I imagine that you are getting skeptical at this point. Am I trying to claim that the antiquated concepts of earth, air, fire, and water can give us a rational way to interpret our messy post-modern reality? Well, never mind the Greeks and never mind the physicists. Just look at the poets. One thing you can discover over the centuries is that anyone touched with even a smidgen of poetic genius tends to sense physical manifestation in terms of earth, air, fire, and water. This is particularly true of the greatest British poets. Shakespeare's last plays are riddled with images not just of nature but of the four primordial elements. You can also find them in other Elizabethan plays, in medieval tales of the Holy Grail, in the 17^th Century metaphysical poets, and in the Romantics. They are also found in more recent works such as James Joyce's Ulysses, William Butler Yeats' A Vision, T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet, Hermann Broch's The Death of Virgil, and J.R.R. Tolkien's Silmarillion. In American literature you don't see imagery of the four elements quite so frequently, but there are traces of them in Poe and Whitman and in some 20^th century poets. They even make an appearance in Alfred Hitchcock's cinematic masterpiece Vertigo. No trace of the four elements in post-modern fiction, but of course there's not much of anything in post-modern fiction.

So if a poet is a human being who can perceive the energies of the universe most intensely, the greatest ones throughout the centuries have recognized something meaningful about earth, air, fire, and water. Shakespeare and Yeats never would have developed their radiant spirituality without them. At this point we must again be pragmatic. If something works, it has value. So if you want to be a nature mystic, you have to start paying attention, not just to the natural elements of clouds and light and stars, but also the metaphysical qualities of earth, air, fire, and water. This is a conclusion which I reached only with great reluctance, since the modern Neo-Pagan movement is absolutely monomaniac about the four elements. They are fixated upon them to the point of fetishization. To a contemporary Neo-Pagan the four elements are mostly useful in their tiresome let's-make-magic power games. In this they are imitating their predecessors, those delightfully loathsome medieval ceremonial magicians, who spent their lives barking out orders to earth, air, fire, and water whenever they felt like it. Modern Neo-Pagans are equally smitten with the idea of manipulating the four elements for their own vainglorious power trips. "Powers of the earth, be here now!" is a cry that you will frequently here at a good Neo-Pagan ritual. Fat lot of good this does anybody. Never mind trying to understand a natural element as something which can stimulate your imagination or reveal a spiritual truth—hey guys, let's order the powers of fire to come into our magic circle, and then you can watch us smoke!

Well, if I work with the elements of earth, air, fire, and water these days, it's only on a perceptual basis. You can start finding earth, air, fire, and water parallels everywhere you look, if you simply start looking. I have, for example, discovered that I find all aspects of their energies whenever I contemplate something which is complete in itself. A thriving plant, for example, needs a balanced blend of earth, rain, air, and sunlight to thrive. A loaf of bread, the perfect spiritual food, is equally composed of four attributes: the grain of the earth, a leaven which fills it with air, the water which makes the dough, and the fire which turns it into nourishment. Wine, the classic spiritual drink, is also balanced between the grapes of the earth, the liquid of their blood, the scent of their fragrance, and the fire of their spirit. And why are beaches so popular anyway, if only because they are an elemental blend of shore, breezes, sunlight and water? When earth, air, fire, and water come together, something fundamental about life is revealed.

So here was my next great insight. I was now midway through my magical mystical summer. I had started paying as much attention as I could to the natural forces of wind, stars, light, and so on, but that hadn't been enough. I decided that the metaphysical energies of earth, air, fire, and water might instead reveal the true secrets of nature mysticism. If I could figure out the core essentials of the four elements, they would surely get me and Bladud up into the air. But how was I supposed to do this? Study them further? Commune with them? Well, it never rains but it pours. The answer came to me with a splash. Water! Water was the only element that counted. Never mind earth, fire, and air. I realized all at once, and with absolute certainty, that water was going to get me off the ground and into the sky.

Janet, I'm sure you haven't forgotten Cyrano de Bergerac's preferred method of achieving upwardness, namely by evaporation. Well, the old Epicurean gentleman was on to something. Water is the most vital element on our planet. In and of itself, it has always been a symbol of life—seeds will sprout in water and water alone. We live in a universe where forms and structures are constantly losing energy and breaking down, but at the same time other forms are always emerging—and whenever this happens, they most frequently come into being thanks to the action of water. Don't forget that planet earth is mostly planet water. And science tells us that 62% of the human body is water. We like to think that our bodies are solid matter, but we are walking water much more than we are walking earth. It is no exaggeration to say that we resemble clouds or rivers more than anything else in nature. All of us imperfect, foolish human mortals are all wet, all the time.

One of the earliest pre-Socratic philosophers, Thales, decided that water was the basis for life. He also believed that water had mastery over the other elements. This insight was similar to that of ancient Daoists, who also felt that everything came down, finally, to water. Chinese Daoists believed that if you wanted to understand life, you needed to understand water. When a good Daoist went into the wilderness to get a sense of spiritual reality, he spent his time contemplating water. Not the trees, not the mountains, nor the earth—just the water. This is not a bad idea. Start watching water, observe how it flows, moves, revivifies, and changes form, and you will start to see something about the fundamental reality of life. You want to live the best possible life? Live like water. You want to be free? Flow like water. Try to resist the flow? You're in trouble. The best possible symbol for Daoism is not the black and white yin and yang circle, but flowing water. And remember that Tolkien tells us in The Silmarillion that you can hear an echo of the creation of the universe in the sound of running water.[56] I decided that in and of itself, water might contain the metaphysical answers I needed to know. As for upwardness . . . well, I had not forgotten that water is the heaviest of the elements. So how could it get me into the air? Well, water might be heavy, but it is also the one element which possesses innumerable ways of getting off the ground. The most obvious means is evaporation—our planetary life is based on an endless cycle of water rising from oceans, rivers, and ponds, and then falling back to the earth when it condenses.

But there is more to water's upwardness than evaporation. In Carver's riverside park, where Ralph and I enjoy our Saturday morning constitutionals, there stands an ancient oak tree, one of the most magnificent trees I have ever known. They say that some trees possess more personality than others, and this oak is one of the most spectacular trees you can possibly imagine. It is a whole universe in itself. Getting to know this tree has made me understand why the Druids were so stuck on their oaks. And darn it, I do feel like some kind of Druid whenever I am with it, since the tree feels like a bridge between Earth and Heaven. What is most spectacular about this tree is its majestic height. I can only guess how tall it is, but it seems to reach over a hundred feet into the air. This means that water has to rise dozens of feet from the ground to the highest branches in order to keep the tree alive and flourishing. The botanical term for this rising is osmosis, the flowing of moisture from one cell to another. But that is an inadequate way to describe the rising of one of the heaviest substances on earth. Something strange and perhaps metaphysical is going on whenever water rises upwards in a tree. It rises so effortlessly that its water could reach into the empyrean if the tree were tall enough. When this happens, gravity no longer exists.

So maybe this was the solution. Medieval witches had managed to propel themselves into the sky because they understood everything about how water rose from the earth. Therefore if I would also figure out the secrets of water, upwards I would surely go. I had already had plenty of experience in cloud watching—water watching was needed now. So I started to watch water. I watched it every chance I got. I sat and watched the rain for hours at a time, I made special trips to the river where I would sit on the bank, just watching the current and trying to keep my mind as pure and as contemplative as the best Daoist poet. I paid attention to mists, rain, clouds, and most especially to morning dew, which is one of the purest forms of water (the Daoists called it celestial water). I began to scribble down any kind of insight that occurred to me, anything and everything I could notice. I also reread one of my favorite philosophers, Gaston Bachelard, who produced some of the most brilliant insights about water ever recorded.[57]

And what were my conclusions? Believe it or not, I did come up with a few interesting ideas. The first, predictably, is that water is absolutely free. It goes anywhere it wants to go. You cannot force it to move where it doesn't want to—it will always find its own route, and it will never follow either a set plan or a straight line. And it always wants to go somewhere—movement is essential. Water is never inert. It is always in continual flux, even when it seems to be frozen solid. Granted it will always seek out the lowest level, but even when this happens, it keeps on the move. It meanders. It wanders. It always flows effortlessly, whether it is moving through space or organizing itself into form. It is, by the way, continually organizing itself into spherical shapes—circles, spirals, or vortices—just as if it were alive, or if its energies were constantly creative. There are no dead ends as far as water is concerned, let alone any kind of stasis. More importantly, water is also egoless that it is constantly dissolving or merging with other substances. Anything you want to know about ego permeability you can learn from water. Give water enough time, and it will merge with anything, which seems to be its preferred way to generate new form. It is able to assimilate many different substances, if only salt or sugar, in a way that it becomes saturated with them. It is equally good at binding disparate materials together, as in bread dough or potter's clay. And don't forget about the water in our atmosphere. We water beings are continually inhaling as much water as air.

And nothing can clobber you like water, both mentally and physically. Water is the strongest of the elements. It possesses a limitless ability to dissolve solid substances, even hard rock. In the natural world it is constantly wearing things down, smoothing them out, or washing them away, but at the same time it also solidifies, deposits, and builds things up. Our planet is in constant and perpetual transformation by the forces of water. One interesting thing about this transformation is that the sound which water makes is usually rhythmical. Anyone who spends time contemplating flowing water is acutely aware that it definitely possesses a rhythmic voice, even if it's not speaking Ye Olde Englishe. Sometimes water sings, sometimes it laughs, sometimes it murmurs, sometimes it weeps. But always it speaks with a sense of rhythm, either in the sound of its waves or in the patterns it makes when it falls from the sky. There is no more harmonious sound in nature than that of flowing water.

The other interesting thing about water's rhythm is that it is especially sensitive to the rhythms of the sky. If there is anything on planet earth which is continually responding to cosmic influences, it is water. We can easily see the effect of the sun on water (when water is warm it flows more quickly), or the effect of the moon (in tides and patterns of germination). The surface tension of water reacts to even the smallest celestial stimulus. This is as true of Lake Michigan as of your average mud puddle. Cosmic energies are continually causing water to contract, expand, move, evaporate, or freeze. These energies are not always evident when you turn on the tap, but they do impact all the water on the earth, from the tiniest snowflake to the Atlantic Ocean. Which means that the 62% of our bodies which is water must also be impacted by celestial energies, even though we cannot consciously sense it. This is easy to see in the influence of the moon. The water in our human bodies is always impacted by the cycles of the moon, which is why people tend to go lunatic when Luna is strongest.

Here I should probably to say something about the moon. In many ways, the moon is perhaps the single most important natural element in our lives, if only because of the way it influences water, the primal element. I absolutely adore the moon. It is the soul of the sky. If you want poetic inspiration, all you have to do is start paying attention to the moon in its radiant glory. I've already mentioned how I've learned to watch the light during the day, but that is nothing compared to the joys which come from contemplating the light of the moon. The Japanese understand this and have been enthusiastic moon gazers for centuries. You can never get too much of the moon. If there is no time or space in your life for moon gazing, moon communing, or moon ecstasy, you deserve whatever else you've got, namely television. But I'm getting moonstruck. The worst thing you can do to a moon experience is try to imprison it in words. I'm supposed to be talking about water, right? And the metaphysical lessons I learned from it.

Or rather, didn't learn from it. Here I am again, rambling my head off. I'm trying to avoid telling you one more time that I was getting nowhere. Water, water everywhere, but not a drop to fly. I had come to numerous delightful insights about water, and I was hugely proud of myself for figuring them out. Move over, Laozi—here comes Mona Wilcox, Water Woman. But do you think I was finally flying? Do you even have to ask? Water Woman was still stuck right where she had always been, with her feet plastered upon the earth. I can't remember how many hours, days, weeks I had spent contemplating water, but exactly how much upwardness do you think it generated? Water goes upwards, to be sure, but Bladud wasn't made of water. He was stick, string, nails, and brushes, and very dry brushes at that. Here I must confess that one evening I gave him a good soaking with the garden hose and then waited to see what would happen. Well, for fifteen idiot minutes I just stood there, expecting to ascend, feeling like a complete fool, and vastly glad that my backyard is surrounded by a privacy fence. I've already mentioned Thales, but are you familiar with the most famous story about him? One day when he was out walking, he was so lost in thought that he accidentally fell into a well, from which he had to be rescued. A perfect fate for an impractical water philosopher. With all that I had observed about water, I had also forgotten to watch where I was going, namely exactly nowhere.

This sums up where I was by August during my magical mystical summer—nowhere. Was it time to give up and acknowledge failure? Water was the mystical answer for the Daoists, but predictably it wasn't working for me. So what was next? What was left? What more could I do? Not very much, as far as I could tell. The garden hadn't revealed any kind of secret to me, nor had the green world, nor the natural elements, nor the four primal elements of earth, air, fire, and water. I was still mired in gravity. What was wrong?

It finally occurred to me that I was looking at the natural world through the sentimental spectacles of my leftover Neo-Paganism, derived from Wordsworth and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, both of whom were convinced that Mother Nature was really very nice. Alas, that is not quite the reality of the natural forces which surround us. Nature is red in tooth and claw. Nature is an amoral force that is absolutely indifferent to the dreams and desires of us paltry human beings. Ralph is a reasonably domesticated dog, but he reverts to a wolf in the wilderness should any enemy dare to approach his territory. Underneath our civilized veneer, I suspect that a good percentage of us humans are the same. A human being living in a state of nature is not a contented native on a South Pacific island, but a two year old child screaming his head off for more more more. Natural urges in human beings happen to be brutal. We like to think of Nature as sweetness and light, and we dream that there might be some kind of enchanted harmony between the natural world and the human soul, but this is a vain sentimental dream.

A dream with an ancient history. A desire to live a life in harmony with the natural world has been part of western culture long before the hippies in the Sixties. In the decadent days of the Roman Empire jaded urbanites enjoyed reading pastorals, where they could contemplate happy shepherds living out their lives in rural simplicity. Never mind that throughout history the lives of real shepherds have been pretty brutal—reality doesn't matter when you're a bored sophisticate who wants to immerse yourself in a dream world of benign natural forces. This kind of sticky sentimentalism has never vanished from Western culture. It reached its culmination in Rousseau and his disciple Wordsworth. To these two complacent fools, nature was never brutal, never harmful, never amoral—it was always and forever nice. "Nature never did betray the heart that loved her," piously announces Wordsworth in one of his poems.[58] Yeah, right. I mean there the man was, living out his life in his cute country cottage in Britain's Lake District, where he never had to contend with wind chill factors, heat indexes, mosquitoes, ticks, hurricanes, earthquakes, droughts, floods, wolves, coyotes, lions, tigers, bears, Moby Dick, or Charles Manson. Nobody ever socked it to this nature's child—he was born, born to be mild. His numerous admirers, blandly perceiving nature from the comforts of their bourgeois security, have also closed their eyes to the amorality of the natural world. It is the ultimate in human hubris to think we can realistically contend with nature's most powerful forces. As much as I adore the natural elements, I have always known that a fragile human being like myself needs protection from them, especially in a harsh continental climate. It pains me to have to say this, but even Emerson was too sentimental in his view of nature. Being a transparent eyeball is not the greatest thing in the world, not in the middle of a sandstorm or drought.

One thing I've always liked about the Japanese is their lack of sentimentality about nature. They can love it and respond to it as much as us Westerners, but they never delude themselves about its potential for destruction. Before the modern era, structures in Japan were constructed of wood because of the ever-present threat of earthquake. Nothing ever lasted in Japanese culture. A stone building like the Grecian acropolis would have been a waste of effort. Today we look at the acropolis as a sublime symbol of human aspiration, but nature will inevitably destroy it as she destroys everything. Real nature is not just scenery, nor has real nature been designed for our sentimental appreciation. Certainly we can enjoy what we experience in the natural world, but a human being who tries to live a purely natural life without the benefits of civilization is asking for disaster. Janet, you can do your best to recreate a sunset or a landscape with paint and canvas, but don't ever forget that you're only representing a small part of reality.

So I finally concluded that all of my sentimental preconceptions were preventing me from perceiving natural forces with any kind of accuracy. My insights about the natural world were not giving me any answers, let alone generating any kind of mystical vision. Was there something else that I was missing?

You bet there was. Something pretty big.

Mona

* * *

August 4

That's right: big. As in spectacular or enormous or stupendous. Something that can knock you right out of your paltry little skull. One evening I realized that there was something about the natural elements which had never quite registered with me. I was paying attention to the prairie and the sky, but I had never let myself truly perceive their immensity, their boundlessness, or their stunning vastness. I realized that what I was missing was a sense of the sublime. If you want to see at nature as it truly is, you need to look at it with the kind of awe and wonder which only a vision of the sublime can generate. So Janet my dear, believe it or not, here is the next step on our journey towards upwardness. We must now contemplate the sublime.

The idea of the sublime is an aesthetic concept which has been studied since classical antiquity. The Roman writer Longinus was the first to use the term, which he applied to the kind of exalted poetry that produced an elevated (lev!) impact on the reader. He thought that the sublime was the highest form of literary expression that human beings could create. The British Romantic poets were also enraptured by the idea of the sublime. They deliberately sought out exalted vistas in the wildest and most mysterious parts of nature, and a good deal of their poetry is an attempt to record their responses to it. A sense of the sublime can likewise be found in the visual arts, in painters like J.M.W. Turner, who turned color and form into miraculous luminosity. It is also found in the American painters of the Hudson River School with their astounding natural landscapes. And the sublime is everywhere in classical Chinese paintings with their mysterious towering mountains, glowing mists, and indistinct vistas. These paintings invariably lift the viewer upwards into liberating space.

But what exactly is the sublime? How can you define it? Perhaps the only thing you can say about it is that it generates feelings of overwhelming wonder in human beings. It also has connotations of wildness, power, and infinity. It is not so much a philosophy as it is a mysterious sense of cosmic grandeur. They say the sublime as an aesthetic concept is exhausted these days, which is probably true. One person's sublime is another person's banality. But the idea of the sublime was one of the key philosophical and aesthetic concepts in the 18^th century, and if you ask me an aesthetic concept from the age of Enlightenment has infinitely more value than anything you might find in the post-modern cultural mess. Let us not forget that when you encounter something vast and overwhelming, you are jolted out of your ordinary mindset into the most intense feelings of awe or even terror. Human beings will always be transported by anything that seems immensely vast: mountains, endless forests, cataracts that thunder and roar, vast abysses which seem to reach into the heart of the earth, raging seas, or the burning sun itself in the vast sky above our heads. The sun's mysterious grandeur and its intimations of the Divine have always made it a sublime force. Turner's famous last words were: "The sun is god".[59] Which again brings me back to the idea that the quickest and the easiest way to reach the Divine is through light. Not through dogma or religion or scripture or your average pumpum, but through the light. Few of us are spiritual enough to truly experience the Divine with our faltering human senses, but anyone can experience light. Any kind of natural light, whether from sun or moon or stars, can fill us with a sense of the sublime at any moment of our lives. If you want to live in a wider, more expansive reality, where the Divine is as close to you as your next breath, you have only to contemplate the light.

Light—or anything else which is vast and overwhelming. The sublime can be found everywhere in the world if you start looking for it. All you need is a special kind of seeing, plus the kind of open mind which can respond to what is vast and overwhelming. In Illinois I can't be a mountain watcher, but I can experience the sun, the moon, clear starry nights, and spectacular thunderstorms any time I like. And the Mississippi River has got to be one of the most rapturous sights on the planet. If you look intensely at something possessed of majestic force or grandeur, and if you respond to it with the soul of an artist, you will be able to sense its revelatory potential, even in Dullsville, Illinois. Of course it also helps if you take time to listen to soaring music or contemplate the thoughts of others who have been kicked in the head by natural immensity. Nevertheless, your own efforts can get you where you need to go any time you like.

So experiencing the sublime is a feeling of elevation, of awe, of light. Gee whiz, if that doesn't sound like flying on a broomstick! When medieval witches took to the skies, I doubt that they used the word sublime, but this was the kind of experience they were getting. Soaring through the vastness of the sky with the eternal stars lighting the heavens above them . . . If that isn't a sublime experience, I don't know what is—and I should know. Anything sublime always has a vertical effect—you start feeling like you want to expand upwards. And guess what the word sublimes means in Latin: high. Says Longinus: "For, as if instinctively, our soul is uplifted by the true sublime; it takes a proud flight, and is filled with joy and vaunting, as though it had itself produced what it has heard".[60] Lev! Lev! You want to go up? All you have to do is find the sublime.

But just paying attention to whatever is sublime in your life . . . Is this supposed to be enough to lift you physically off the ground? Well, of course not. So now that we've become aware of the sublime, we have to take the next step, which is . . . can't you imagine? Well, if you can't, then just imagine imagining. If you want to acquire mystical vision, there is one more essential which matters, and in many ways this is the most crucial one yet, namely creative imagination. The sublime isn't enough. You also need to start using your imaginative powers in conjunction with what you can perceive, and most especially with your perceptions of the sublime. I am talking about the way an artist or a poet perceives the world, namely through intense observation coupled with the kind of inner vision which can generate new thought or form. So once you go on red alert to whatever aspect of the sublime you can find in your life, you also need to take some time to transform it into some sort of creative form. This doesn't necessarily mean that you have to turn all of your experiences into iambic pentameter, let alone shape or color. But you're never going to truly perceive the world—or anything sublime—unless you have some kind of creative response to it. Emerson was always celebrating the power of human imagination when aligned to perception. He knew as well as anyone that it's never enough to perceive what is around you; you need to see things with your mind's eye as well. Our capacity for creative imagination is the only way we can truly perceive the spiritual dimension of reality. And the spiritual dimension of reality is what we get whenever we contemplate the sublime.

Creative imagination. This is one of the most crucial secrets to acquiring transparent eyeballhood and the spiritual freedom which goes along with it. I have already mentioned that creative unfoldment seems to be how the universe is sustained—the energies of the cosmos are forever in a state of becoming. It is interesting to remember that the first two hexagrams of the I Ching are K'un, the receptive, balanced by Ch'ien, the creative. In ancient China these two energies were considered to be the primal powers in the universe. Receive and create: there you have the secret of life in a nutshell. By the way, have you ever realized that the Sanskrit word karma comes from the root syllable kri, which means create? Kri-ate—after thousands of years the sound can still be heard in our modern English word. Karma means not just action or fate or how energy rebounds upon you, but creation. What you create is your karma.

The Romantic poets all but deified the human capacity of creative imagination. They believed that imagination alone was enough to create a poet. Not rhythm, not rhyme, not an ability with words—just imagination. Said Blake: "The Imagination is not a State: it is the Human Existence itself".[61] Now imagination is another word which is difficult to define. My dictionary tells me that it is an act of creating a mental image of something which is not present in reality or perceivable by the senses. This makes sense in a limited way—imagination is yet another form of perception, but a kind of mental perception where something is perceived only in the mind. But there's more to it than that. Whenever you're being imaginative, you're still perceiving, but you are now picturing in your mind that which might not even exist. This makes imagination a kind of stimulus. It is something which can spontaneously generate new form or concepts within you.

In other words, whenever you imagine something, you aren't just forming images of non-existent reality—you're envisioning something that goes beyond reality. Or you're experiencing a new kind of reality where you can observe farther, better, and deeper. Creative imagination can become not only your most authentic guide to life, it can be a transforming force which will shift every aspect of your existence into freer space. So our imagination is yet one more thing in our lives which can liberate us. Freedom of perception matters, to be sure, but the workings of a free imagination matter even more. As we go through our ordinary lives, we are forever limited by barriers of all sorts, including our society's endless rules and restrictions. However, we can freely move in both time and space whenever we exercise our imagination. I am also convinced that whenever we imaginatively bring forth something out of nothing, our consciousness is heightened, our awareness is intensified, and we are living in harmony with the most basic forces of the universe.

Think for a moment how imagination can enrich your life. You have to deal with the humdrum and the ordinary all the time, but whenever you take the time to go into imaginative space, you can conjure up endless visions of new form or meaning. The best kind of life is when you see your existence as an imaginative journey where you are not just perceiving the world around you, but transforming it through an inward process. This makes imagination a kind of spiritual perception. Indeed, it can be our primary organ for the discernment of spiritual reality. Mind you I am not talking about the True Believer kind of imagination, which conjures up those traditional divine concepts on whose behalf it is necessary to fight or to kill. But if you start regarding the world around you on an imaginative basis, you can look upon the stars or the mountains not just as manifestations of the physical world, but as guideposts to the Divine. Of course, any kind of imaginative creativity is hard work. It takes energy and self-discipline. But when it comes together—rapture! A thrill of ecstatic joy like no other we can experience. There is nothing which delights the soul more than successful imaginative effort and its endless potential.

In recent years scientists have begun to realize that chaotic nothingness is the underlying reality of all physical form. This dovetails with stories from ancient mythology, where the one thing necessary for the creation of the universe was chaos. I like this idea very much: if chaotic nothingness is the bedrock reality of our universe, it means that our universe must be a place filled with unlimited possibilities. And there are always ways for us to take advantage of these possibilities, as long as we're smart enough to remember my prime directive, namely the importance of letting go, specifically of our ingrained habits and prejudices. You will never be able to generate new form in your existence if you spend your time desperately clinging to the past. Writers need to start with a blank piece of paper, or at least a blank computer screen, the way a painter needs an empty canvas. One thing I've noticed time and again is that any spark of inspiration, even a single letter on an empty piece of paper, can turn into a moment of revelation. Janet, you have probably felt this as well whenever you place that first drop of paint upon a canvas.

All this means that one of the principle aims of our existence should be to aid and abet the creative unfoldment of the universe. If anything is immortal, if anything in our world is real, it must be creativity itself. Philosophers over the centuries have disputed whether Being or Becoming is the central reality of the universe, but I would say that it is only Creating which matters. We human beings are born with aggressive tendencies; we could not survive without them. But those people who can direct the natural outpouring of their personalities into imaginative manifestation . . . they are the ones who are going to succeed in life. Forget Nietzsche and his ravings about the will to power—what matters in our lives is the will to create. And whenever we are being creative, we are expressing our spiritual selves in the healthiest way possible.

But one more thing is also necessary. We need time in our lives in which we do nothing but dream imaginative dreams. Janet, have you ever tried to spend several hours of your life doing nothing? No work, no television, no reading . . . just a whole lot of nothing? This is an idea which grates on the nerves of us puritanical Americans, who know perfectly well that spare time should be used profitably, as in the making money kind of profit. Which is why you don't find too many poets or artists among the Puritans. Well, if you want to be a successful creator, you need to make time in your life for imaginative dreams, or you may as well forget about everything. It is no accident that a good many artists come across as absent-minded dreamers. They know the value of reverie. Mind you, I am not talking about aimless daydreaming or mind-deadening fantasy, especially the kind of nonsense that people indulge in when they contemplate what they will do once they've won the lottery. This is the kind of escapism you find in substance abusers, and fantasy can be as addictive as the other innumerable substances available today. Daydreams which are utterly divorced from the reality of your life are as impractical as anything can get. What you have experienced in your life must always support your imaginative efforts, or else they are valueless.

But true creative ability only comes from those kinds of natural daydreams where you can engender meaning or vision outside of time. You need to make moments in your life when you can let your mind roam unfettered and free. At times like these, the 62% of us which is water actually becomes water, a shimmering pool where visions can appear. You might think I'm talking laziness here. After all, how can something like reverie be valuable, compared to a stock portfolio or a condo in Florida? I seem to be recommending the delights of going brain dead. Surely this is just a waste of time? Not by a long shot, not when your time is passed in the kind of poetic reverie which is the stimulus to all genuine creativity. Out of these empty hours came the Iliad and the Odyssey and everything glorious in human existence ever since. If you ask me, creative reverie happens to be one of the highest states of consciousness we humans can experience. It is infinitely better than meditation or Samadhi or satori—it beats them all hands down. When you find yourself at ease letting your fancy roam where it wishes, image and form can start to appear in your mind's eye without any effort. Janet, I know that at this time in your life you are burdened with studies, deadlines, and academic stress. You don't have a lot of empty afternoons in which you can indulge in nothingness. But I guarantee that if you start making nothingness a part of your life, you will be astonished at the new form which it will start to generate.

When I first realized the value of reverie, I discovered that it can most frequently be stimulated by some kind of natural element, such as flowing water or sunsets. But the most delicious form of reverie must surely be cloud reverie. Anyone who goes through life as a cloud watcher will know what I'm talking about. All those endless free-flowing misty forms constantly forming and reforming in the sky above our heads can generate the most intense kind of dreams and visions. I will never be able to get enough of clouds. They provide me with endless drama and revelation. If you don't have a clue how to start indulging in creative reverie, just start watching the clouds. And you don't even have to start flying into them barefoot. Simply turn your gaze upwards, and pow!

In case you haven't noticed, all this talk about (1) the sublime, (2) creative imagination, and (3) reverie is starting to move us upwards. So now we must rise to our next step—transcending time and space.

I'm on a roll.

Mona

* * *

August 10

So you just had a hysterical two hour phone call from your mother, my esteemed older sister, during which she ranted and raved about your exchanging emails with what she termed a fruitcake? Janet, to whom could your mother possibly be referring? Surely not to me? Gee whiz, your mom knows perfectly well that I have never liked fruitcake. But I'm not too surprised at your mother's fury, or about her insistence that you keep clear of me from now on. She and I have never gotten on, not since I told her that her most recent face-lift made her look like a ghoul in an Ed Wood movie. Granted this wasn't the most tactful statement I've ever made, but when a woman goes through life overeating, feeling sorry for herself, staring at the television, and suffering through elective surgery, she needs to hear the word ghoul once in a while.

Your mother also needs to remember that you have become an adult with a mind of your own, which means you are free to communicate with whomever you please. Besides, what's wrong with my emails? The main thing I've been discussing is metaphysics, and what's wrong with that? Metaphysics is a very virtuous concept. It can do people a lot of good. It would even do your mother some good if she could tear herself away from her HDTV long enough to give it a try. She might also start indulging in some creative reverie, but . . . well, who am I kidding? What are the chances of that? When people get set in their ways, that's where they tend to remain. I doubt that your Mom would be impressed even if I explained to her that I (and I alone) have figured out a way to transcend time and space. She'd just go back to her National Inquirer.

At any rate, I'm sure you're still dying for me to spill the time and space beans, so here we go. You are probably wondering how any human being existing in three dimensional reality can move beyond both time and space into . . . well, what kind of nonsense am I talking about now? Isn't transcending time and space as unachievable as anything can get? On the contrary, it happens to be the easiest thing in the world to do, if you put forth a little effort. Let me start with time first. Or rather, the timeless. Everything I've discussed most recently—experiencing the sublime, creative imagination, reverie—these occur in the realm of the timeless. If you want to use the right energies to generate upwardness in your life, the first thing you need to do is free yourself from time. And time happens to be slimiest four letter word in the English language. If ever there was anything in corporate America that needs to be escaped, it is time.

Do you remember the famous moment at the beginning of Easy Rider, where our hero, Peter Fonda as Wyeth, throws his wristwatch into a ditch? It's his way to say goodbye to the system, and he does it by escaping time. Off goes the watch, the free open road is before him, he revs up his motorcycle, and he blasts off into the timeless. No more nine-to-five for him, no calendar, no clock, no appointments, no deadlines. He now has all the time in the world. Well, this one unforgettable cinematic scene has been nagging at me for several decades now, especially since I have never been able for one second to escape time. I might spin my Emily Brontë fantasies about freedom and rebellion, but I have never been able to break away from the constraints of regulated time. One thing I do every morning is put on my wristwatch—I can't make it through a day without one. No one can. It is not possible to jettison time in our culture, not when our lives are constantly ruled by clocks and calendars. But the problem here is that clock time happens to be the absolute worst kind of duration. It goes exactly nowhere, except to the last syllable of recorded time, which, as the fellow said, signifies nothing.

Why can't I live a life outside of time? Why does the fascist tyranny of clock and calendar rule my existence? Once upon a time people's lives were ruled by the seasons, and that was the only kind of duration that mattered. The hours in the day had no meaning to them, nor did the days of the week, nor was there any difference between weekday and weekend. How did it happen that our so-called civilization has reached what is a time dead-end? Our exhausted culture is totally dependent on time, it devours time, it annihilates time. We pretend that we can control it through follies like time management or multi-tasking, but there is never any extra time that I can see. It is the one thing that people simply do not have. Plenty of money, plenty of creature comforts, plenty of entertainment, but never any time. The exchange of time for money is a Faustian bargain if there ever was one. Once upon a time Grandpa could while away the hours in his rocking chair on the porch, but that is a meaningless pre-modern concept these days.

But it is a delusion to think that mechanized clock time is the only time we ever know. Clock time marching inexorably towards the future is only one way of experiencing time. We need to remember that the whole idea of the clock is meaningless when you remember that the spiritual reality of the universe seems to be timelessness. The universe exists only in the Eternal Now, and the Now cannot be mechanically measured any more than life can be mechanically created. The present moment is an instant wholly outside of time. Which means that clocks and calendars are not giving us truth but some kind of falsehood. Paradoxically they always render time static. Time seems to move in the measurements of a clock, but it isn't a flowing kind of movement, and real time flows the way water flows, as a continually unfolding event. This is, by the way, yet another good reason to observe the behavior of water. Have you ever noticed how many poets conceive of time as a river? They are quite right to do so. Of all the elements, water is the most intricately connected to time.

All of which means that true time is not a mechanical concept but an experience. Our psyches weave our moments together in meaningful ways, which is the principal way we comprehend time. So if time is an experience, then there must be ways you can escape it, without having to ditch the wristwatch. Zen, with its emphasis on living in the moment, was always thought to be a liberation from time. Zen masters taught that whenever you meditated enough to put yourself in the here and now, you managed to free yourself from duration. In the present instant, there is no past, nor is there a future. There is only the timeless. I suppose this is the only good thing you can say about sitting meditation. It is one way to escape time, but not one which supplies a whole lot of fun.

Fortunately one thing I've learned over the years is that there are much easier ways to escape time. Whenever you're lost in imaginative reverie, for example, time does not exist. Nor does it exist when you let yourself get caught up in great works of art or the glories of nature. You can also escape clock time through rhythm. If you listen to any kind of rhythmic duration, whether the beating of a drum or music, you will discover that ordinary time isn't quite there any more. And nothing takes you out of time like slowness. The Chinese have a proverb: haste is error. The best way to deal with time in our miserable hurried-up world is through deceleration. In the natural world, nothing can ever be hurried. Everything happens according to the correct amount of time. If we're smart, we know that this is how we should live our lives, namely by letting events happen naturally. You need a sense of slowness if you want to be aware of each moment as it unfolds in its richness. What is spiritual is always slow. If you ever do manage to free yourself from the insanity of rushing around, you will discover that slowness is one of the rarest and most joyous sensations you can experience. A feeling of slowness, by the way, isn't that difficult to acquire. There are lots of things you can do to slow yourself down, where you don't necessarily need more time but a fuller sense of time. Simply reading a book puts you into slower time. So do animals—since they live in an eternal present they are always existing outside of time. Or you can try practicing an art like calligraphy—a Zen master applying his brush to paper always has infinite amounts of time. Or you can lose yourself in any other kind of creative activity, or eat a meal where you taste every flavor in the food, or spend time in your garden—it is no accident that sundials are such a popular ornament in gardens, since there is no better place experience the true richness of time.

But slowness doesn't matter as much as the natural patterns of time which we can experience in our lives. I have discovered that clock and calendar lose their meaning whenever you start focusing on cyclical time: the rhythms of day and night, sun and moon, seasons and harvests. These natural movements are more faithful to time's true reality than anything your wristwatch might tell you. I've already spoken about the joy you can feel when you establish a relationship with one of the natural elements, but establishing a relationship with a season or a phase of the moon is also a marvelous way to find contentment. Your seasons will come and go like faithful friends, and you can delight in their presence whenever they are with you. My most enchanted month of every year is October, when the harvest is complete, the summer's heat has ended, and the days turn mysterious with colors and mists. I find myself reveling in every moment.

When you start dealing with time like this, you are also dealing with space. It is important to remember that time is the same thing as space. They seem to be different phenomena, but they do have some kind of connection with each other. This is a conclusion which has been reached by an enormous number of people throughout the centuries, including both the greatest mystics and the most rational quantum physicists. Both time and space apparently came into existence at the Big Bang, and it seems as though they have been evolving or devolving into each other ever since. Physics tells us that our universe is composed of events which are neither particles nor forces, but both simultaneously. This means that time can vary, the way space can vary. They can both be twisted or warped. If we analyze our own experiences, we can see that time and space are never sharply separated. It's like they are the inside and the outside of the same thing. So if you can escape one, you will be able to escape the other. Escape a certain space, and you will be able to escape time as well.

It's not difficult to escape from space—all you've got to do is move. Go from one spot to another. Walk down the block or drive to the nearest town, and your space has been changed. And the farther you go, the more space you've escaped. I've always like the idea of the wandering bard, the poet who roams the world with only his songs in his heart. Now here's a human being who exists outside of space, thanks to the power of his own two feet, and time, thanks to the rhythm of his words. The wandering bard is a familiar figure in both Eastern and Western cultures. I've read that ancient Chinese poets took to wandering the earth whenever they had the chance, which also is a characteristic of Celtic or Germanic bards. Homer was also this kind of wanderer, and in the modern era we can see poets such as Walt Whitman, Vachel Lindsay, and Jack Kerouac also managing to escape normal reality through movement. In On the Road Kerouac and his buddies manage a kind of transcendence whenever they keep moving and moving. It was their rebuke to the America of the 1950s, with its material accumulation, its conformity, its lethal corporate types, and its obsession with money. And yes, I know that On the Road is a guy type of book, where the women are barely conceptualized. But the core of the book is a vision of this country's potential for spiritual richness, which can appeal to anyone, male or female.

But here I must note a problem. Let us go back to Easy Rider. Even though Wyatt and Billy in Easy Rider were constantly moving through space, neither of them managed to free himself from time. The only thing that happens after Wyatt throws away his wristwatch is that Billy starts complaining that they are wasting time. He gripes about it all the way through the movie, right up to Wyatt's famous announcement near the end that "we blew it." This comment created considerable debate when the film was first shown. Wyatt was right, of course. The two of them did blow it—they were trying to escape time and space via the highways and the machines that the system had created, with a cache of American greenbacks hidden in the gas tank. Fat chance for them both, especially since neither of them had any intention of throwing out the cash. Somebody should have reminded them that time is money. Wyatt dear, you don't escape the system, let alone time and space, by hanging onto your dollar bills. You have to let them go. You have to let everything go. Only then you can escape both time and space. Which brings me to the point of all this metaphysical folderol. Space, the physical reality in which we find ourselves, happens to be held together by gravity. So if gravity has profound control over space, it must have the same kind of control over time. Not that I've ever read this in a physics textbook, but it makes sense on a metaphysical level. Great mystics frequently describe their experiences in terms of upwardness. Gravity doesn't seem to exist for them during a mystical experience any more than time does. Escape time, escape space, and maybe you can escape gravity as well.

Escape gravity? Maybe on a flying broomstick?

So here was my next great insight. I realized that I had been concentrating solely on spatial reality in my search for upwardness, namely the gravity which was keeping me tied to the earth. What I needed to figure out was a way to escape space's identical twin, namely time. Eureka! Maybe this was the solution at last! You see, there happens to be an effortless way to warp your whole time/space thing, even without having to climb aboard a broomstick. All you have to do is go under the threshold.

Mona

* * *

August 18

Threshold? That's right—a threshold is exactly what you need. Take my word for it, Janet my dear—here is the solution to broomstick upwardness and the spiritual liberation that goes along with it. If you want to escape both time and space, you have to go under the threshold. The boundary. The gateway. And in case you haven't noticed, I am back to talking about the sublime.

Let's go back to word origins, which is always a way to find truth. I have already mentioned that the Latin word sublimes means something high or elevated. However, it's interesting to discover that the word comes from two other Latin words—sub, meaning under, and limen, a threshold or a boundary. Sublimen. The original meaning of sublime had connotations of something under the threshold. Huh? Gee whiz, you don't exactly think of thresholds when you are contemplating some kind of spectacular natural vastness, but this happens to be the original meaning of the word. It makes sense if you think about it. Something sublime will always take you out of your normal, everyday reality into an expansive new way of being. So if you want to find the sublime, which as far as I'm concerned is the same thing as wanting to find the Divine, you don't necessarily need to pay a visit to the Grand Canyon. You simply need to pass through a boundary of some sort.

So there you have it at last! My great big fat flying broomstick secret! You find it under the threshold! Limen! Lim! And up you go! The lim sound matters as much as the lev. The sound which means boundaries, frontiers, borders—as in limit or subliminal or limbo. Put the lim sound along with lev, and you've got the key, not just to a flying broomstick but maybe also to the Meaning of Life. If you want to get off the ground on a broomstick, and escape space and time while you're at it, what you need to do is pass through some kind of boundary—which is also known as experiencing the sublime.

What I'm talking about here are transitional moments or spaces. The kind of boundary where you can pass from one state to another. This is the old idea of "betwixt and between" or "neither this nor that" which you can find in countless fairy stories. Whenever you are betwixt and between, you are in an otherworldly moment or place which is in some kind of borderland outside of normal reality. These places are a kind of crossing point between the physical and the spiritual. You can find them everywhere in your life, between waking and sleep, land and water, or day and night. And if you start paying attention to them, you will discover that they are a metaphysical means of entering into a different kind of existence. After all, true boundaries don't divide two separate forces but join them together, which makes for a blending or a merging. Spirit and matter, time and eternity . . . whenever they come together at a crossing point, they are no longer divided but intermingle with each other. The energies of both are reconciled into unity.

Are you aware that a great many philosophers from Heraclitus onwards have seen the energy of the universe in terms of polarities or some kind of tension between opposites? Indeed, polarity seems to be one of the most basic aspects of our physical reality. This is not necessarily a bad thing—out of these polarities comes our endless becoming and evolving, not to mention Blake's idea of the energy which is "Eternal Delight".[62] Physical reality seems to thrive upon a continual exchange of opposites. They are not so much at war with each other as they are constantly interacting, with one or the other momentarily paramount. Yin becomes Yang becomes Yin becomes Yang. Each Yin and Yang symbol, remember, possesses a small part of the opposite force embedded within. Whenever their energies interact, they produce a constant giving and taking, contracting and expanding, inhaling and exhaling. Rhythm at its most primordial. Natural forces moving harmoniously in one musical whole.

But you can find more than harmony at a threshold: you will also discover a kind of spiritual equilibrium. A glimpse of the fourth dimension, perhaps? Or a place to hear the music of the spheres? Forget the drugs, forget the meditation cushion—it is only at a crossing point where your consciousness can truly shift and expand. Have you ever noticed that any kind of threshold is a place which is throbbing with power? Your senses always go on red alert at a crossing point, which makes everything unusually vivid. Indeed, your consciousness can change with the simple act of going through a doorway. Walking into a room or going outdoors . . . it's only a small shift, and no metaphysical energy is evident, but if you start paying attention to what happens when you cross over, you realize that something does definitely change. Crossing a threshold was always of immense importance in old poems and tales, and quite rightly so, since it is a place where consciousness is always transformed. If you learn how to go betwixt and between one reality and another, neither entirely in this world nor in the world of the spirit, upwardness will be yours for the asking.

The Romantic poets were always emphasizing edges, horizons, and boundary lines, but they also stressed the importance of synthesizing these contraries. Shakespeare did it as well. At the visionary climax of Antony and Cleopatra, everything blends together: life and death, the finite and the infinite, earth, air, fire and water. Shakespeare must have had some kind of mystical intuition about ancient Egyptian culture where opposites like day and night, or sky and earth, could easily blend into a graceful unity. And don't forget that they all come together in the serpent, which does not die but simply crosses a boundary into a wondrous new existence.

So . . . back to using lim to transcend time and space. You must understand that our normal world of ordinary reality is intersected at countless points by the world of the spirit. If you start paying enough attention to these kinds of thresholds, with practice you will discover that you can cross over them any time you please. This seems to be what makes a true visionary poet or artist—they can move into a spiritual reality any time they like. But how the heck are you supposed to do this? How is it possible to cross a threshold, particularly one that happens to be invisible? Am I saying that this can be accomplished in an ordinary American town filled with shopping malls, fast food, foam fingers, and the other detritus of post-modernity? Not to mention a big city like Chicago where you can never escape traffic, stress, pollution, and the celebrated political machine? Where on earth can you find a spiritual threshold, let alone figure out how to cross it? Janet, I'm supposed to be telling you practical things, aren't I? Is there a no-nonsense way to do it?

You bet there is. And the first place to start is . . . place. You can't cross a threshold unless you find one first. Fortunately, this is easy enough. You simply need to be on the lookout for those kinds of special places where different kinds of natural forces come together. Locations like these can most easily be found whenever one of the primordial elements intersects with another. I'm again talking about earth, air, fire, and water, the metaphysical elements of our universe. Consider the top of a mountain, for example. The summit of a mountain is a place where earth encounters air in a spectacular manner. Of course, all the land on our planet is constantly interacting with air in one way or another, but the summits of hills or mountain are especially energized. Whenever you come to the crest of a great towering peak, the earth thrusts its way into the air with vibrant intensity. This is the kind of crossing point I am talking about, where one element dramatically interacts with another. Not for nothing have the summits of mountains been considered holy ground in numerous cultures all around the world, where an awful lot of prophets have gotten their marching orders from the Divine. In recent times, at least since Petrarch climbed Mont Ventoux,[63] you can find countless poets, artists and visionaries climbing mountains, from Wordsworth ascending Mount Snowdon to Kerouac on Desolation Peak. On some level they all seem to realize that the mere fact of making it to the top of a mountain will lead to a different sort of reality. Take a look at the last few chapters of Kerouac's Dharma Bums if you don't believe me.

But mountains are not the only holy spots on this earth. All over our planet, all through the centuries, people have also sensed a kind of special energy at those places where earth comes into contact with water. History shows us that the interaction between water and earth has provided us poor humans with even more sacred ground than all the holy mountains combined, the summits of which are not that accessible. The shorelines of bodies of water have also been considered especially powerful. I have read that medieval Irish bards would go to the bank of a river or the edge of the sea when searching for inspiration, poetry, or divination—and they had only one term for all these qualities, the Gaelic word eicse, which is some kind of cousin to the Greek word ecstasy.[64] Go to a place where water meets earth, and if you surrender to the energies of the place, something will shift. You might find yourself escaping stasis, and eicse will be yours.

But it's not just those places where water meets earth that matter; water interacting with air can also provide us with a powerful threshold. Have you ever paid much attention to the kind of energies you can feel whenever it starts to rain? In and of itself, rain possesses many spiritual secrets. It is a movement of one primal element through another, and whenever this happens, something mystical can happen as well. All of which means that plain, ordinary rain, can shift your consciousness as easily as the summit on Pike's Peak. This is especially true of those moments before the rain begins to fall. There is a special kind of expectancy mood at these times, which you can feel not just in the natural world around you but within your own psyche as well. If you stop to pay attention to these moments, you might find yourself entering into a special kind of dreaming reverie where you can sense a natural harmony between your own being and the other forms of life which surround you, from the trees and the birds to the earth beneath your feet. If you start to concentrate on this mood, you will discover that you are no longer a separate being but simply a part of all life waiting for the grace of water. When the rain finally does start to fall, there is no joy like the joy you can feel whenever you can experience regenerative energies coming down from the heavens.

Rain, however, is not the only way in which water interacts with air. Whenever the earth is covered with a fog or a mist, the water is not so much moving through the air as it is suspended in it. A perfect egoless merge, in other words, the benefits of which I have mentioned many times now. So fogs can provide you with another powerful threshold. They were frequently emphasized in the old tales, since they were often necessary to enter into the world of faerie. But even here in distinctly unfaerie Illinois, everything shifts when the world is wreathed in mist—the light wavers, the earth loses it form, and normally stationary objects seem to move. At such times, even the most depressing concrete landscape turns mysterious and otherworldly. If you have a chance to experience a fog in all its intensity, you will find that you are almost floating through some kind of intermediary region where everything has become radiant with mystical beauty. Things normally unseen become invisible. The earth itself seems to be dissolving, and the vagaries of light bring new shapes into being. If you go into this formlessness as deeply as you can, once again you can find yourself in a different kind of reality. I can't guarantee that you will encounter the Faerie Queen, but a shift into a new kind of vision can be yours for the asking.

You remember I wondered why the British Isles continue to produce nature mystics in generation after generation. I originally thought that the answer was to be found in Britain's mild maritime climate. However, I have since realized that the Brits are such powerful visionaries for one reason only: water. Water is the psychic element par excellence; there have been numerous studies which demonstrate that it is the one single element which profoundly stimulates human intuitive power. Our telepathic ability is always energized by the full moon when our bodies are clogged with water, and also whenever we are physically near a large body of water. They say that Edgar Cayce moved to Virginia Beach because he knew his psychic ability would be enhanced living next to the ocean. The British and the Irish are constantly experiencing drizzle, rain, fog, and sea-borne dampness. They seem to live out their lives under water. That eternal wetness must stimulate dreams and visions like nowhere else on earth.

Of course, we don't have that kind of British wateriness on this side of the pond. A misty day in our dry continental climate is something of a rarity. Fortunately, you don't necessarily need a lot of fog or a nearby lake to find a good threshold. You don't even need a place, period. Thresholds can also be found at special moments of time. Time is the same thing as space, remember. If you don't have easy access to Mt. Sinai or the Irish Sea, no problem. All you have to do is start paying attention to those special moments of time when two different intervals meet and blend into one. Go betwixt and between in time instead of space, and you will see what I mean. I am talking about shift moments, those specific points of time when some kind of intersection of the eternal with the present moment can occur. These types of shifts happen continually throughout our lives. One of the most potent comes every year at Halloween. Halloween is an ancient, pre-agricultural holiday that always takes place in an eerie moment outside of normal clock time. Nowadays we think of Halloween only in terms of kids and their trick-or-treat, but the holiday is much more than that. For thousands of years Halloween has been an uncanny interlude where the ordinary world disappears, normal boundaries dissolve, and a gateway into a different sort of reality can appear. If you start to pay attention to what is occurring in the natural world at this time, you will discover many strange and inexplicable circumstances. In other world, you will be encountering thresholds, and the spiritual can become perceptible if only you make an effort to see it.

But you don't have to wait for a holiday to experience a shift moment. Time shifts are also with us every day—at the stroke of midnight, for example, traditionally the witching hour and the most potent moment in the nocturnal realm, when it is neither one day nor another. Sunrises are also very special betwixt and between moments: a clear morning dawn can always be a particularly illuminating threshold. When the early morning light starts to illuminate the earth, everything in the natural world comes to life with a sense of miraculous joy. Dawn is also the one moment of our days when natural energies can most successfully revivify our bodies. If you can start experiencing the dawns not just as the start of a new day but as a special kind of revitalizing gateway, not only will you start going through your life with much more energy, you might also get a new sense of metaphysical reality.

But I have also learned that sunsets and twilights can be even more powerful thresholds than dawns. A spectacular flaming sunset is one of the best ways we can experience the majestic vastness of the cosmos. Whenever I realize that the evening's sunset is going to turn into a color-filled wonder, I stop whatever I am doing and settle down so I can experience it as intensely as I can. If you are a devotee of watching the light, there is no light which is quite as wonderful as the flaming colors of the sunset. Maybe I'll never be a painter, but whenever I see a sky burst into gold and crimson, I know I'm perceiving something real about the universe, about truth, and about life itself.

But even the most extraordinary sunsets are surpassed by what comes after them, namely the threshold of twilight. The "two light" that comes over the world every evening is the most potent shift moment of them all, worth all the mountains peaks on the planet. Great poets have always recognized the value of the twilight—nobody is ever going to write a book entitled The Celtic Daylight.[65] I cannot begin to count how many years it has been since I fell in love with the twilight, and I am its most dedicated votaress. When the light begins to fade and the physical energies of the world start to settle, everything around you suddenly seems filled with incredible meaning. Janet, stop and think about our prairie twilights for a moment. I have read that in other parts of the world, the change between day and night happens so rapidly that night comes upon you almost without you noticing it. Here in North America we are fortunate that our twilights can be long and lingering—and no threshold, neither spatial nor temporal, is more powerful. In the Homeric poems the gods would frequently appear at dusk, and innumerable visionaries in both East and West have found that mystical vision comes only when day is fading into night. In a long, lingering twilight, the unseen can become as real as the seen, time becomes timeless, and everything seems possessed of eternal value. Only in the twilight can you truly feel the wonder and joy which comes from the present moment, the delight we should always have in just being alive, and the enchantment which comes from seeing things as they really are, infinite. If nothing else, twilights are moments of perfect tranquility and repose. This alone makes for an otherworldly kind of enchantment. Ephemeral problems always disappear into the growing darkness. Learn how to lose yourself in an exquisite twilight, and the cosmos is yours for the asking.

Of all the thresholds which we can experience, twilight also seem to be the one that most intensely heightens awareness. Sound, fragrance, and breezes become miraculously intense, while the world grows ever spacious. Twilight also engenders a sense of balance. It is a moment which is in perfect equilibrium between day and night, and you can sense that two different kinds of time are coming together in perfect harmony. If you pay enough attention, you can also see that the world around you is taking on an eerie new splendor. There is never anything ugly in the twilight, where harsh or vulgar outlines fade away. So do our concepts and thoughts: nothing ever seems burdensome to us when the shadows are gathering. It is only at this moment, when physical form is dissolving, that we can best sense the inner spiritual reality of everything that surround us. We can also engender all kinds of creative reverie. I have learned that as the light fades, images, ideas, and words inevitably start forming in my mind. Our consciousness is never fixed at these moments—it wanders at will into fertile space where inspiration can be had for the asking. Janet, I don't know if the coming of darkness can stimulate artistic vision in you the way it engenders words in me, but you might want to give it a try. I always have pen and paper with me in the dusk so I can start scribbling down my thoughts. Sometimes I keep writing until it is too dark to see. The words and ideas that come to me during the twilights frequently have an extraordinary vividness and are poetic in and of themselves, even if I can't always arrange them into rhythmic form.

Physical twilights are not the only twilights we can experience—there are psychic twilights as well. These are the moments we experience between waking and sleeping. Science tells us that when we start to fall asleep our brain produces Theta waves, the kind of mental energies which generate the most fantastic images within our minds. Creative people have long understood that the psychological borderland between waking and sleeping is frequently the most opportune time for the generation of new ideas. Thomas Edison, for example, would take a nap while holding two steel balls in the palms of his hands. As he fell asleep, his arms relaxed and the balls fell onto the floor, thus waking him up at exactly the moment when his unconscious mind was most deeply inspired. In other words, most of his remarkable inventions got their start in his psychic twilight. In recent years writers like Julia Cameron in The Artist's Way have recommended that you start writing something, anything, every morning as soon as you are conscious—in other words, while your brain is still throbbing with Theta energies. Many people, including myself, have discovered that their creative blocks disappear when they give this a try.

But don't limit yourself to your ordinary twilights. You can give yourself a double whammy if you fall asleep during a real twilight, or during a twilight which is blessed with mist or rain. Chances are that at moments like these you might start to experience some of the most vivid imaginings you have ever known. But why stop there? Make it a triple whammy—psychic twilight, real twilight, mist covering the world, and then go to a lake shore or river bank. Or do it when the moon is full. Or at Halloween. Or beside a gigantic oak, which is another kind of threshold, standing as it does as a bridge between the earth and the sky. And then, maybe, just maybe . . .

Then what? Can I guarantee that you will be able to sing like Taliesin or paint like Rubens? Of course not. But if you do starting making time and space for betwixts and betweens in your life, I can guarantee is that something will shift within your existence. The world of the spirit will grow much more vivid. You will start to get a feeling of mystical connectedness to the inner essence of the forms which surround you. If nothing else, the act of experiencing a betwixt and between is guaranteed to engender reverie and dreams. Does all this sound vague and silly, as in the most gruesome type of New Age flakiness? It probably does, especially to people who have never bothered to pay attention to any kind of threshold. But give it a try sometime. You might be surprised.

It occurs to me that I've invented something here, and it should be obvious what. No, I'm not talking about inventing a flying broomstick—at least not yet. Janet, when I figured out the importance of thresholds, I realized that what I had invented was . . . my own religion.

I mean, think about everything I've said so far. During my great quest for transparent eyeballhood, which seemed to be the key broomstick upwardness, I had progressed step by step through the manifestations of the natural world, up to and including the sublime. The sublime had in turn led me to understand the importance of boundaries and thresholds, specifically the threshold of twilight. I now decided that I had found the answers to everything I needed to know about life, the universe, and everything. In other words, I was now blessed with my own private religion. Of course this particular religion contained only a sect of one, but maybe that is the best kind of sect. I was certain that it was going to do me far more good than anything I might gain from Christian dogma, Zen enlightenment, or Neo-Pagan gibberish. Especially since I would never make the mistake of propping myself up with any kind of spiritual materialism. I had constructed a vision of the cosmos which seemed to be conclusive. The universe and I were now pals. My search was at an end.

But there was one teensy weensy problem left, and I'm sure you don't have to ask what. That frivolous problem known as Bladud. Ah, yes—the broomstick. The non-flying broomstick. Maybe I finally possessed my own private unreligion, but along with it came an infuriatingly uncooperative unbroomstick, propped up in the corner of the living room, as earthbound as a two ton block of concrete. I was supposed to be figuring out how to fly that darn broomstick, remember, but I still hadn't managed to get anywhere near upwardness. At this point in my life I had spent three years trying to get that wretched thing off the lousy ground, but the only thing I had managed to accomplish was the Mona Wilcox religion. And do you think that the Mona Wilcox religion was getting Mona Wilcox off the ground? Do you even have to ask?

One evening I went out to the backyard with Bladud in hand and gave him yet another Chicago Bears try. It was a moonlit September evening, a perfect betwixt and between moment, and the wavering light of a gorgeous autumn dusk was enveloping me. It was one of those enchanted moments when the universe seemed to radiate a serene tranquility. I had the perfect unreligion, I had the perfect broom, and I had a sublimely perfect moment. How could gravity be a problem at a time like this? Silly question. Do you think I managed to get off the ground? Don't ask me to repeat the pleading, bird-brained words I spoke to Bladud that evening—I cringe to remember them. The main thing I can remember about that night was that Bladud felt heavier than usual. Sure I had my own religion, but things weren't getting better—they were getting worse. The truth suddenly hit me: if I still couldn't get the damn thing off the damn ground, then . . . it meant my brand new, absolutely perfect, completely self-reliant religion totally sucked. Then came an even bigger revelation. I realized that when Ralph Waldo Emerson urged everyone to establish their own relationship with the universe, he had been wrong!

Whaaaaat? Was I saying that Emerson could have been wrong? Indeed I was, and it was the only rational conclusion I could reach. My reason, that fabulously divine part of me, was telling me that that developing my own religion had been an exercise in complete futility. My belief system had no more validity than any of the other systems which have infected the planet over the centuries. I could do my best to perceive the world around me and speculate on metaphysical matters, but my efforts were ultimately useless. And I was tottering on the brink of disaster. The problem went like this: what if I started to become a believer in my own religion? What if I went brain dead because of it? I liked to think that I would always be open to new ideas and new ways of doing things, but what would happen if my religion succeeded in slamming my mind shut? For all I knew I might become as addicted to my belief system as those other millions of True Believers who currently stalk the planet. If I let the belief system I had invented take over my life, I might become as fanatical about it as any coven sister, TV preacher, or suicide bomber.

What exactly had happened here? Had I let myself become one of Voltaire's "pious frauds"?[66] Maybe it was even worse than that. How did I know that I wasn't turning into a Starhawk, or a Pat Robertson, or even a Heinrich Himmler? For all I knew my religion might eventually lead to reeducation camps or worse. If nothing else, it was obvious that I had become nothing more than a frivolous spiritual dilettante who had invented an amusing little belief system for herself. I hadn't found liberation, just a conceited form of solipsism, plus the kind of monster ego that goes along with it. Meanwhile the broomstick continued to lie on the ground like a wet noodle. The sky above my head was still waiting to be flown into, but I was farther away from my goal as I had ever been. The minute I had invented a Mona Wilcox religion, I had immediately turned into a dysfunctional member of it—which was, if you think about it, utterly predictable. I had fallen into a black abyss, and I had to find a way out.

Fortunately, the means of escape immediately came to me. I realized that what I needed at this critical juncture was a tomato seed.

Only the strong survive.

Mona

* * *

August 28

Janet, what do you mean you're starting to think fruitcake was an accurate way to describe your favorite aunt? I was talking tomatoes, mind you, not fruit. There are no tomatoes in fruitcakes. Fruitcakes got their start in of medieval Britain, while tomatoes are a plant of the New World. Sweetie, you're the one who's getting things scrambled, not me. Stop trying to turn into your mother and bear with me a while longer. You will see that I am continuing to make perfect rational sense.

We must now contemplate the seed of a tomato. Or rather, how you can get the seed of a tomato to germinate. If you have gone to the trouble to create your own religion but then discover that you're a dysfunctional member of it, what matters at this critical juncture of your life is a seed. Seeds are of tremendous importance to all living beings. There would be no life on this earth without them. Here I have a terrible confession to make: I have always had considerable trouble getting my seeds to germinate. I confess this to my shame. Never mind that I've been gardening since I was ten years old and know everything there is to know about growing and harvesting innumerable kinds of plants. Getting any kind of seed to germinate has always been a complete headache for me.

Or at least it used to be, until I started planting my seeds by the phases of the moon. You can get even the most recalcitrant seeds to sprout if you plant them according to the appropriate lunar energies. All you have to do is plant your seeds a day or two before the new moon appears in the sky. This gives them an opportunity to rest in the moist earth before they start to respond to the light. It seems to be waxing light of the moon which coaxes them into life much more than the sun. Old timers have always known that seedlings always grow more rapidly in moonlight than in sunlight. Try planting your seeds when the moon is waning, or when it is at one of the quarters, and you will understand what I'm talking about.

There is nothing unusual about this—for millennia gardeners and farmers have understood the importance of the moon's energy when they plant their crops. But one other thing matters here, and in many ways it is the most important. You must plant your seeds not only according to the correct phase of the moon but also under the appropriate astrological sign. If you plant your seeds a day or two before the new moon, and when the moon is in an earth or a water sign as well, most of them will sprout. However, if you plant your seeds in a barren astrological sign, such as fire or air, very few of them will germinate, even if you are also planting them at the correct moon phase. This is an experiment which can be duplicated at any time, at any place on earth, and with whatever seeds you choose. In other words, it is an experiment which is both scientifically and rationally valid. Astrological signs happen to matter when you are trying to get a seed to germinate.

All of which means, in short, that there must be something to astrology.

Oh, my goodness/goddess/god! Here am I, a rationalist and an empiricist, announcing in plain English that I think there must be something valid to a thoroughly discredited humbug like astrology! But I intend to stand my ground. My experience with seeds has shown me time and again that astrological energies do make a difference in our lives. Mind you, I am not talking about the horoscopes on display in the daily newspapers, which seem to be aimed at prom queens and/or village idiots. But on a broader level astrology can tell us something about the kind of energies we deal with in our physical reality. After all, astrology is based on the elemental energies of earth, air, fire, and water, which is a poetic way to find truth. Astrology works as a means to identify cosmic forces. Its general outlines are valid and demonstrable. My seeds wouldn't be sprouting if it didn't. And if something works, says William James, you use it.[67]

I say this as someone who is skeptical about everything, including organized religion from Amish to Zen, not to mention alchemy, occultism, talking deities, magic, dragons, Bigfoot, Templar/Tibetan/Egyptian mumbo jumbo, and any political/scientific/legal/medical paradigm that you care to name. I am also resoundingly unimpressed with the arguments about the validity of astrology—the books I have read which allegedly "prove" that astrology works are hugely unpersuasive. I have also never been impressed with the blatherings of professional astrologers, except for the ones who are willing to acknowledge that the interpretation of an astrological chart is more of an intuitive thing than something rational. Two different astrologers can produce two different interpretations of the same chart, which means that there is not a whole lot of scientific judiciousness at work. And stop to consider, for instance, what Marlene Dietrich and J. Edgar Hoover have in common. They are both Capricorns. Therefore they are astrologically similar. Marlene Dietrich and J. Edgar Hoover?

Yes, I am familiar with every single criticism about astrology that has ever been made, and I agree with most of them, but I still plant my seeds according to the signs, I harvest according to the signs, and I get a bumper crop out of my garden every year because of the signs. Which leads me to conclude that my own physical being must also be responding to the movements of the planets and the stars as much as do my seeds. After all, the effect of the sun upon planetary life forces, including us arrogant humans, is easily perceptible. The effect of the moon is less so, but reasonable people will acknowledge that it's there. Is it so absurd to think that the planet Jupiter or the constellation Virgo might have an effect upon us as well? We should remember that the farthest stars in the galaxy definitely have an influence upon earthly life, if only gravitational. The fact that this influence cannot be measured with current scientific instruments doesn't mean that it doesn't exist.

Let us also not forget one cardinal rule of modern physics, namely that everything is interconnected. Nothing in the universe can exist separate and apart from everything else. To imagine that human beings are never affected by celestial energies is the ultimate in human hubris. There is no separation between human beings and the natural world any more than there is a separation between human beings and the energies of the stars. In recent years, especially with the development of quantum physics, people have started to acknowledge all the interconnections. So is it so impossible to believe that the energies of a particular group of stars might also have a definite impact upon earthly life? If you need an answer, just ask a tomato seed.

I am not talking about the misuse of astrology as a predictive tool—to claim that our destiny is controlled by the stars is obvious nonsense. Our fate is not shaped by anyone or anything except ourselves. But we can make better lives for ourselves if we take practical advantage of astrological energy. If you start arranging your life according to the signs and the phases of the moon, you will discover that your goals are more easily met. Astrology also works as poetry and vision and rhythm. It is a way to find metaphysical meaning. Dante also tells us in the Paradiso that the Divine wisdom is communicated to us through the stars, which is an idea that I like.[68] The greatest philosophers have always been star-gazers. It's never enough to achieve wisdom from learning or experience—you've also got to know something about the eternal energies of the stars.

Ancient people found patterns in the stars, also known as constellations. Constellations are imaginative attempts to arrange the stars into living beings or artifacts: heroes, gods, or animals. Which means that constellations are metaphors. Poetry in the sky. As much as I adore the traditional constellations, I enjoy making my own stellar patterns whenever I can. There are always new visions to be found in the night sky—weightless mosaics scattered through in the void, fantastic embroideries rich with silver and pearl, or sparkling fountains. You might be interested to hear that every time I do make an effort to contemplate the stars, some of them always come together to form the shape of the god Prometheus. Every time I look at the night sky I always find him. He is never in the same place twice, but his pattern is always there, distinctly visible in the twinkling lights above my head. I suppose this is a case of me seeing what I want to see, since Prometheus is my favorite of the Greek gods, but maybe he really is there in some way.

It's interesting to remember that the patterns of most of the more famous constellations bear little or no resemblance to their official astrological symbol. The stars in the constellation Sagittarius, the centaur, resemble a plain ordinary teapot. Now how could anyone conjure up an image of a half-human, half-horse creature in a group of stars which resemble a rectangle with a spout? But once upon a time this is exactly what people did see. They felt that the energies from this group of stars had some kind of connection to what was traditionally felt about centaurs: wisdom, philosophy, love of animals. Whenever the sun was in this sign, these qualities could be felt manifesting on earth. So what if this is entirely subjective? If you ask me, the fact that astrology is so relentlessly subjective is one of its strengths.

So maybe this explains why tomato seeds germinate, but how does this apply to discovering the secret of a flying broomstick? Simple. Transparent eyeballhood needs something more than thresholds to take root in your consciousness. It also requires a sense of balance within your psyche. You are not going to acquire the spiritual energy necessary to fly on a broomstick unless you are living in harmony with the energies of the universe. And here at the millennium, you cannot live in harmony with the universe if you are clinging to exhausted and outmoded Piscean forms. What astrology is currently telling us is that our planet is going through a major shift in its energies as it moves from the Piscean into the Aquarian era. In other words, we are currently experiencing an astrological betwixt and between moment, or to put it more delightfully, we are living in a period of the astrological sublime.

I am talking about astrological eras, the kind of energy shifts which occur every two thousand years or so. If you look at human history as a whole, you can easily see that people or cultures frequently exhibit characteristics of the predominant astrological energies of their era. Two thousand years of fire energy (Aries, the era of classical antiquity) were followed by two thousand years of water (Pisces, the Christian era), and we are now shifting into the energies of air (Aquarius). Is it so impossible to think that for a two thousand year period in antiquity the earth was bombarded by one particular kind of atomic energy, which the ancients called fire but which we might see as the energies of strong nuclear force? And then with a shift of the planet or perhaps certain stars, this was followed by two thousand years of Piscean water (or electromagnetic) energy? And here at the millennium, we are sensing another shift, into that of Aquarian air (weak nuclear force)? All these suppositions could possibly be verified by scientific research, but I'm not expecting any MIT egghead to start an investigation any time soon, especially since you cannot ever find a closed mind like the ones you find in our post-modern academic establishment.

However, the fact that our world is currently changing in numerous and quite profound ways should be obvious to anyone with half a brain. The changes we've seen in the past few decades have been more profound than anything that has happened since the time of the last astrological shift two thousand years ago. Visible signs of a break with past energies can be found everywhere you look, in all aspects of culture and society. The most obvious sign of the break is the complete and utter exhaustion of Piscean forms. Pisces is a water sign, meaning things which are emotional, mystical, and hidden. It is also a sign of faith—you believe in the teachings of your sect only because they are emotionally important to you, not because they can be empirically verified. This kind of thinking and being is currently disappearing all over the planet, and most especially in the realm of faith. Also known as indulging in true-believing, brain-dead fanaticism.

Of course, what with our blinkered tunnel vision, we tend to think that human beings in all eras have been true and faithful believers in their religion of choice. But if you know anything about classical antiquity, you can see that there weren't a whole lot of True Believers prior to the Piscean era. In the Greek and Roman eras, faith in the invisible was not especially important to anyone. I have read that when you moved from one city to another in classical antiquity, you simply started worshipping the gods of your new city, instead of hanging on for dear life to whatever divine concept you had been raised in. Can you imagine an Israeli moving to Baghdad doing the same today, let alone an Arab relocating to Tel Aviv? This is difficult to imagine, to put it mildly, when religion is something that grabs hold of your vitals, wraps its way around your entire consciousness, strangles your guts, devours your consciousness, and interferes with every breath you take. The other interesting thing about classical antiquity is that there were no suckers—oops, I mean martyrs—to any kind of belief system. Fanaticism and the lust for self-slaughter didn't start happening until those emotional Piscean energies started to engulf the planet in the first century of the Common Era—and since when countless zillions have died for Jesus or Mohammed or the proletariat or what/whomever.

Not only were there no martyrs in the Arian age, there wasn't much mysticism. The only trace of mystical thinking you can find in classical literature is Plato and his discussion of divine forms. That's about it. Nobody in classical antiquity yearned for union with the Divine, nor did they sequester themselves in monasteries in the hope of attaining spiritual vision. The only mystic to be found in classical antiquity was Plotinus, who lived in the first century CE, right when Piscean energies were starting to bombard the planet. After him philosophy devolved into neo-Platonism, a much more amorphous way of thinking than classical Platonism. Of course we have had nothing but mysticism ever since, principally of the Christian or the Islamic variety. Nowadays we unthinkingly revere the mystic as a special kind of person who has achieved the kind of spiritual triumph that the rest of us slobs can't quite manage. But mystics of any sort did not exist in antiquity. The Arian age was one of philosophy, rationalism, and learning. People weren't interested in salvation, and they were content to live with only the vaguest conception of an afterlife. What mattered was how best to live out their lives on this earth. All this vanished with the coming of the Piscean era. From the age of the philosophers to the age of the brain-dead faithful in one astrological step.

It wasn't just in the Mediterranean area where this kind of change occurred. Daoism, for example, started off as a philosophical system in the sixth century BCE. Its practitioners were philosophers, scholars, and observers of nature. But lo and behold, in the First Century CE everything started to change. All of a sudden good Daoists started to feel a need for priests, monasteries, and rituals. Daoist alchemy became popular, not to mention charms, exorcisms, and other forms of spiritual hocus-pocus. Have you ever heard of Zhang Daoling, otherwise known at Chang Tao-ling? He lived from 34-156 CE and was the founder of the Way of the Celestial Masters sect in Daoism, an organization which emphasized, among other things, sin and redemption (sound familiar)? Wikipedia tells me that "The Celestial Masters were the first group of organized Daoists. Before their foundation, Daoism did not exist as an organized religion".[69] Leave it to a Piscean to set up a religious organization, and I'm sure the money quarrels started almost immediately. The Chinese don't follow the kind of Western/Vedic astrological system which we do, but it is obvious that one of their principal belief systems was impacted by the shift in First Century planetary energies.

The shift was also felt in the Indian subcontinent. In the First Century bhakti yoga started to become popular, bhakti yoga being devotional yoga to a supernatural savior figure. No longer were Hindus interested in jnana (intellectual) yoga; when they started to feel Piscean energies, they wanted to get an emotional whack from their religion. Hindu philosophy also tottered over into occultism and magic. Around the Mediterranean, belief systems like Stoicism and Epicureanism also began to change. No longer did good Epicurean philosophers emphasize intellectual exercises or philosophical tranquility as the end of life; they started to promulgate their philosophy as a means to salvation. I haven't been able to discover what kind of changes happened to Buddhist beliefs at the time of the shift, but the Zen variety of Buddhism, which got started right smack in the medieval period and which emphasizes irrationality and non-conceptual thinking, is as Piscean as a belief system can get.

Christianity, of course, got its start right around the time of the change from the Arian to the Piscean era. Jesus Christ was the perfect avatar for the new astrological age. In the gospels he is continually associated with water. He turned water into wine, walked on water, calmed the seas, multiplied the fishes—and the secret sign of the early Christians was that of a (Piscean) fish. Of all the exotic oriental cults that were knocking around the Roman Empire two thousand years ago, it was Christianity which attracted the converts. I tend to think this happened not necessarily because Christianity was the true religion, but because it supplied the kind of super colossal emotional wallop which the other cults couldn't produce. Its founder has been executed in the most horrific manner possible, and pretty soon a limitless number of overly-emotional Piscean fanatics were more than eager to follow in his footsteps. Let the martyrdoms commence!

And let the shows begin! Unlike religious rituals in the Arian era, the new Christian believers started producing weekly theatrical experiences that reminded the faithful of the horrible tortures that the founder had suffered. If you had a philosophical temperament in those days, you weren't attracted to this kind of stuff, but those of a philosophical temperament were rapidly dying out. What people did and thought on an emotional level soon became all that mattered. Good Christians have thought it perfectly normal ever since to repeatedly contemplate Jesus' horrendous sufferings year in and year out—a few years ago they even made a chainsaw massacre movie about it.[70] They call it his passion, not his torment, so it sounds like something mild and mystical instead of horribly sadistic. But like Fox's Book of Martyrs, remembering Jesus' sufferings delivers up those wonderful masochistic frissons, the need for which never goes out of fashion.

At any rate, once Pisceans energies crowded everything else out, the western world got a new divine concept, one whose system was based on emotions, specifically the emotion of love. This was a first in human history: a god of love presiding over a religion of love. And how much love have we had ever since. Love conquers all. Love is forever. Love can make you happy. It takes two to tango. Toujours l'amour. Long live Anna Karenina and Madame Butterfly—until they do themselves in, for that wonderful little thing which makes the world go round. Love is the one value that has been constantly exalted for two millennia now, but not for any valid reason that I can see. Love was the predictable excuse that famous American Susan Smith gave as the reason she murdered her children, yes, a great big love. Not that she loved the kids, mind you, she was just crazy about this rich boyfriend who didn't want a partner burdened with two pre-schoolers. Why, darling, yes, now we understand why you drowned them, they simply had to go, but don't be upset, we all know that love means never having to say you're sorry.

Well, here at the millennium, that old gray love ain't what it used to be. The whole idea of love being something tremendous, something exaltée, something that you jump off battlements for, doesn't quite cut it in a world where people are starting to understand the problems of co-dependency. Love as an ultimate value in our culture is at a dead end, as are innumerable other Piscean forms. We live in a world where dead ends and loss of vitality are found everywhere you look. It is not surprising that the most popular youthful subculture around these days is the Goth, where it is de rigueur, so to speak, to dress like a corpse or a vampire. Why a corpse? Why aren't kids dressing up like Japanese samurai or Byzantine noblemen? Looking like a corpse feels quite right when you are unconsciously sensing that old practices and forms are dying all round you. And think about the term post-modern for a moment. What a name for a cultural moment! The only reason it is so popular, one assumes, is that the phrase is so similar to post-mortem. Somehow people feel that our world has somehow become a world of aftermaths and of endings. The more the merrier dead ends.

The sense of endings is particularly evident in the arts, which have been sinking into decadence for several decades now. I used to wonder why it was just my luck to live at a time of complete and utter artistic nihilism. Why couldn't I live at a time when things were fresh and bursting with creative force like Renaissance Florence or Elizabethan London? No, I get to live in an era when artists and thinkers can only focus on exhaustion and closure. Opera is as dead as nail in door. Composers produce soundless music. Visual art is anti-art, full of dreary gimmicks, preferably of the "disturbing" or "perverse" variety. Poetry lacks rhyme, sound, and form. Fiction is not taken seriously unless most of the major characters croak, and in the most pointless manner possible. This feels exactly right for the people who read it since it validates what they unconsciously feel about the world—decadence and endings. In short, death is selling even more than sex these days, which would have amazed writers in the 1960s and 1970s.

And think about the return of the pagan Goddess for a moment. After two thousand years of patriarchal religion in the west, many post-mortem/moderns are turning to a female figure for their divine concept of choice. This isn't progress. This isn't a way to free yourself from fanatical adherence to a damaging belief system and the enslavement that goes with it. This is just another example of decadent entrapment, since the worship of the Great Mother by urbanites who have no experience of the brutality of nature is sentimental futility. It is interesting to remember that the last time the Great Mother was worshipped was in the bad old days of the Roman Empire, when the republic had collapsed and formerly stern, frugal, and virtuous Roman citizens started banging away like you would not believe. Right about the time of the shift from Arian to Piscean energies, in other words. Apparently when astrological energies shift, lots of people get a need for a great big Mommy, not to mention lots of really great sex.

But not even a limitless amount of great sex is enough to keep people from feeling dead these days. A sense of exhaustion is everywhere in our society, even in the way we live. Contemporary American houses have no sense of vitality. They are built like mausoleums and stuffed from floor to ceiling with piles of lifeless artifacts, not dead birds as in Hitchcock's Psycho, but with endless collections of plastic. The lust for possessions in our society is yet one more way to ward off the dying energies—if you spend all your time focusing on past, present and future purchases, you can off the knowledge that forms and structures are collapsing all around you. The entertainment center in American houses serves a similar function. The only energy to be found in most contemporary homes these days comes from that gorgeous twenty-foot-wide plasma television screen. Once upon a time the center of the house was the hearth and its fire, which provided warmth, a feeling of comfort, and even a sense of sacredness. But nowadays an awful lot of people have to have that good old entertainment noise coming at them twenty-four hours a day to fill up the void within. And if the entertainment center doesn't do the trick, why then just swallow some of those high-tech pharmaceuticals, and nothing will matter any more.

The leaders in our culture seem to have as much a sense of being dead as everyone else. Listen to any of the current academic/political/media figures who are enjoying their fifteen minutes of fame, and you hear nothing but meaningless noise. In particular, the academic world is so especially besotted by closure and fatigue that it has rendered itself irrelevant. If you're a university professor these days, the easiest route to the fat life is by destruction. They call it deconstruction, but it is plain old destruction, specifically of anything that used to matter in human civilization. All you've got to do is destroy a work of art, an historical memory, or an ethical concept, and you are well on your way to the paths of glory, which lead but to tenure. If that doesn't work, then destroy the language itself, produce several worthless tomes written in incomprehensible prose, and you will have the world at your feet. This kind of racket didn't exist in the Arian age, when the Daoists were out observing nature and the Stoics were debating ethics, but it's pretty much all we've got now.

But not even academe is collapsing like established mainline religions. They are falling to pieces under the leaden weight of corruption, dishonesty, and meaningless dogma. Most people are in utter denial about the disintegration of their religious organizations. They talk about reorganizing the structure or making that heavy-handed dogma interesting again. You hear this especially from good Catholics. All the Church has to do, so they say, is allow priests to marry, and then all the problems, which are only temporary anyway, will be solved. No more sex with kiddies, no more hush money paid to outraged parents. The faithful will come back, the churches will fill up to bursting, and traditional values will return—and for everybody's own good. If a faith has lasted for two thousand years, then it's going to last forever—right? After all, religions don't come to an end! The faithful can't evaporate into nothingness! A world where Christianity and Islam are only historical curiosities is inconceivable! But in a world of shifting astrological energies, any attempt to prolong a specifically Piscean belief system is a losing battle. And what are Christianity or Islam or reformed Judaism anyway, but distinctly Piscean manifestations?

Of course when the belief system starts to collapse, that's when the True Believers start getting frantic. Fanatically frantic. Our world is still filled with fanatics. When you are emotionally entrapped in a belief system which you think is under assault, you are more than willing to perform any outrage to make sure that the system will go on. Somewhere I read that contemporary Moslems love their faith. This was stated in a positive way, as if it were a virtue to be applauded. You would never be able to convince the passionate romantic uttering these foolish words that the whole idea of loving your faith is a catastrophic problem, not an ideal to be celebrated. It is a Piscean double whammy—emotion and belief all knotted up together, strangling your reason and your common sense, and producing nothing but lunatic emotional turmoil.

What is most depressing about this lunatic emotional turmoil is that it infects not only your average True Believing twat, but also some of the most intelligent and educated people on the planet. You would think that a human being possessed of even average intelligence would be impervious to emotional excess, but the reverse is the case. Try telling a truck driver that he can't have what he wants, and then say the same thing to a tenured academic—and guess which one will react with a screaming tantrum. One thing you see over and over in our depressing world is that the more intelligent a person is, the more fanatically he or she adheres adhere to a belief system of choice. And more frequently than not, it is a political belief system of choice.

So now I must say something about Piscean politics. Yuk. I wish I could pass over the subject in silence since there is no more depressing topic to be found these days. But you cannot describe the follies of the current crop of True Believers without mentioning political True Believers as well, those kind of brain-dead fanatics who are passionately enraptured by their political party of choice. Here at the millennium politics takes the place of religion for a stupendous number of people, especially if the politics are of the ism variety, as in Marxism, pacifism, environmentalism, or anti-Americanism. This is otherwise known as indulging one of those religion substitutes called agendas. Agendas are very pleasant little thingies. The minute you acquire one, you start living in a world of intoxicating delight where guilt-free feelings of brilliance and superiority float like a halo around your head. Even better: you get to persuade yourself that your political group, which is naturally composed of similarly enlightened beings, is working for the betterment of all humanity and will shortly bring forth the earthly paradise complete with lion/lamb bonding.

Of course, if anything goes wrong with this perfect scenario, it's not because of corruption, incompetence, or stupidity on the part of your group—it's because the bad guys are working a dastardly behind-the-scenes conspiracy to sabotage the golden light you are spreading over the world. You know perfectly well that your group cannot do anything wrong, that simply isn't possible, the problems have got to be caused by the bad guys. Mind you, these bad guys are also supposed to be the ultimate in human stupidity, so don't ask me how they manage to get away with their diabolical conspiracies. But get away with them they constantly do, or so the agendistas among us are convinced. Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, and an evil conspiracy is the last refuge of an agendista. So they must constantly come up with excuses explaining why it's not our fault.

Excuses, excuses. If we're talking about politics as religion, then it's time to consider the inhabitants of Planet Excuse, where everything can always be explained away. Alas, here at the last gasp of the Piscean era there's no escaping Planet Excuse. It is one of the most densely populated spheres in the galaxy, with a citizenry composed of numerous interesting personalities: sociopaths, neurotics, substance abusers, overeaters, enablers, drama queens, pathological liars, poseurs, shopaholics, narcissists, bullies, professional victims, attention whores, True Believers, and agendistas. I always do everything I can to avoid the not-my-faulters, but unfortunately our late Piscean culture keeps producing them. What's interesting about the not-my-faulters is that most of them are also hard-core addictive personalities. True believing agendistas have got to the most addictive of all. There are no fixes like those ecstatic fixes generated by the perfections of your political party. Indeed, as fixes go, these must be stratospheric, so where's the agendista who's going to suffer through the rotten Twelve Steps to get rid of them? Not the agendistas who currently stalk the land, not by a long shot, not when they think they're a bunch of St. Francis of Assisi wannabes doing their tidy best to make this tired old world a better place. So it is a waste of time trying to persuade these certitude-dwellers that they're not perceiving reality with clarity, or that they possess the same kind of personality structure to be found in alcoholics or pack-a-day smokers, or that they are first cousins not to John Stuart Mill, but to Pol Pot.

But enough of my meandering mind. Why would I want to stop my betters from spreading their golden light? Am I crazy? Well, of course I'm crazy, everybody thinks so, including the members of my family. I'm even crazy enough to want reason and truth instead of emotion and lies. Maybe I should also mention something about the agendista's reliance upon spin. Pravda wasn't a phenomenon limited to the Soviet Union of fifty years ago—the world today is covered with Pravdas everywhere you look, where truth, language, and logic are constantly being distorted and suppressed by the agendistas among us. Socrates knew nothing, but I can't count how many educated egos I've met who think they know everything, thanks to their constant intake of spin. Not that they would ever admit to universal knowledge, since it sounds so childishly conceited, but it is the core reality of their souls. These people are slaves to an even bigger emotional wallow than anything you can find in Madame Bovary. "Self love is more cunning than the most cunning man in the world," says the Duc de la Rochefoucald.[71] How amazing that he penned these words several hundred years before the onset of American political narcissism.

As for me, I try to see people as individuals instead of members of groups, and I think that there are always new and better ways to do things. I support gay marriage, abortion rights, and (for those losers unintelligent enough to experiment with them) the legalization of drugs. This ought to make me a liberal. But whenever I come up against a liberal these days, I see only vain and complacent True Believing types imprisoned in their frozen mental cells. I am talking about the Noam Chomskys of this world who are furiously determined to take advantage of the prosperity and security which their society offers them, but who also never stop spewing forth endless malice towards that same society. Don't hold your breath waiting for any of these guys to defect to Cuba—what a drag that would be. Right. Back in the bad old pre-post-modern days, this used to be called rank hypocrisy, but not now, when everything is relative. How delicious it must be to allow one part of your brain to detest everything that Wall Street stands for, while another part is constantly preoccupied with job security, investment, and retirement funds. Lucky you: no wonder you get to go through your days with a smug little smile perpetually creasing your face.

What's even more astonishing about the current crop of liberals is their mind-boggling lack of self-awareness. They suffer under the delusion that they are non-conformists but march in lockstep to the presiding groupthink, they profess empathy for the marginalized but their tastes and habits are elitist, and they see themselves as ecological but spew forth nothing but wasteful extravagance. Worst of all, they demand that our elected idiots perpetuate their lifestyle by approving uncounted zillions of federal debt, a fiscal catastrophe that is going to wreak havoc in the lives of future generations. Well, so what? Are bourgeois bohemians supposed to care about the lives of people fifty years down the road? How can anyone expect them to give up their creature comforts and lavish vacations for the sake of people not yet born? Once upon a time there existed the idea of beatific poverty, where a lack of possessions gave you the freedom to go where you liked, to experience what you wanted, to discover truth, find intensity, perceive beauty, and then turn your vision into form. So what if you slept on the floor and ate a lot of cheap spaghetti? You had what truly mattered in life, namely enough time and space for imaginative creativity. This was the world that Kerouac and the other Beats inhabited, the true world, the visionary world, the world where sunflowers could be turned into sutras.[72] How remote it seems today, in our whining wussie country. Well, the good news is that it can still be found, but only by those who understand that there is no greater block to creative energy than money.

Give me anything but a True Believer! Give someone who will acknowledge that all belief systems, whether religious or political, can contain flaws or should be jettisoned if they no longer work. Let me escape all this Piscean greed and fanaticism before it destroys me. No more emotional obsessions. No more True Believers seeing only what they want to see and hearing only what they want to hear. Let the world free itself of organized religions, getting down on your knees, banging your head on the floor before an invisible deity, Edith Piaf, Tristan and Isolde, Romeo and Juliet, the occult, the Beatles, devotees, martyrs, cloistered nuns, magic, alchemy, inquisitors, cults, shopping malls, paranoia, churches, mosques, temples, theophanies, fellow travelers, political voyeurs, spiritual voyeurs, terrorists, hierarchies, polarities, ethnicity, nationalism, feudalism, avatars, caste, materialism, conspiracies, avarice, veneration, worship, suicide bombers, fundamentalism, mandates from heaven, Ponzi schemes, altered states of consciousness, vampires, Gnosticism, Manicheanism, Thomas Pynchon, fan clubs, tenure, the CIA, pumpums, surrealism, Swiss bank accounts, chick flicks, Faustian bargains, erotic obsessions, Zen koans, Hollywood bimbos, agendas, and all the other birdbrain Piscean manifestations which have infected the planet for the past two thousand years. I've had it with the Piscean era. The sooner it goes the better.

But let us remember that there are no endings in nature. It's true that everything about our planet is collapsing into an entropic mess these days, but I need to remind myself that things fall apart only so that new forms can come into being. Whenever energies destruct, new ones inevitably emerge. Every moment of time, including one steeped in decadence, is alive with possibility. "Now bless thyself," says the clown in Shakespeare's Winter's Tale, "thou mettest with things dying, I with things new-born".[73] In the collapse I see around me of Piscean forms, I can also see that something new is about to come into being.

Which brings me back to my non-flying broomstick. I finally realized that in the Aquarian era, my carefully constructed broomstick was an outmoded Piscean artifact. It contained a Heathcliff shaft, remember, and if ever there was a literary character who engaged in a complete Piscean wallow, it had to be Heathcliff. Emily Brontë was clear sighted enough to free herself from the claustrophobic belief system in which she was raised, but the characters in her book indulge in an emotional tempest the likes of which few of us ever experience. A Heathcliff shaft might work in the Piscean era, but it would prove a dud during an astrological sublime. If I wanted to fly on a broomstick, what I obviously needed was an Aquarian broom.

Lift me up where I belong!

Mona

* * *

September 3

Now, Janet—what do you mean I keep telling you that I'm finally going to reveal the solution, but I then wiggle out of it? And I've done this about four or five times now? And you think you're going to have to wait another ten years before I'm finally through? Honey, you're breaking my heart. Aren't you having any fun at all? Well, cheer up! I'm almost there! Really!

Let us return to the idea of Aquarian energies—yes, you've got to hear more about that. The good news is that now we get to look at the future instead of the past. Here at the dawn of the Aquarian era I am seeing more life and energy burgeoning up around me than I ever noticed when I was young. Stop and think about the numerous innovations in our lives in the past fifteen years or so. The biggest change of them all is cyber. We no longer inhabit planet earth as much as we live in cyberspace. These days you can easily communicate with whomever you like in any part of the world. You can also obtain any kind of information that you need. When I was growing up in 1950s small-town America, the only information my family could access came from the town newspaper and the two local television stations. We were living in an informational void, in other words. When I was older I can remember how frustrated I felt when I needed to find information that was unavailable. There were books that I wanted to read, concepts I wanted to research, ideas that needed to be pursued. But the information I needed was hopelessly out of reach, lost in the bowels of the Library of Congress or other east coast libraries. There are few things as terrible as wanting to acquire knowledge but not being able to find it. It isn't like that today, not in our cyber world. Chances are that practically anything you want to know can today be found on the Internet. Most current human inventiveness, energy, and creativity are going into the Net. The Internet is changing human existence like no other development in history. Computers, information, cyberspace . . . these are energies of intellectual air rather than emotional water, and as such, they are Aquarian manifestations. When the dimwits back in the Sixties were babbling about the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, they could only imagine golden living dreams of visions, whatever these might be. Nobody anticipated that the Aquarian era would be digital, interconnected, computerized, and informational. In the Piscean era the truth was always hidden, but in the Aquarian age it will out. Humanity is moving upwards into the fresh clean air where knowledge will be freely available to everyone.

All of which means that the new world ahead of us is going to be a world of thought instead of emotion. This is already happening. People don't just wallow in their emotions any longer, they start thinking about them, and if they conclude that their emotions are a problem, they try to find ways to escape them. They also search out information about how other people have dealt with similar issues. Nothing could be more Aquarian; it would have saved me a lot of grief had I been able to do this when I was younger.

But people are thinking about more than their emotions these days as well. They are thinking about literally everything. We are heading into a world where intellectual stimulation is going to mean more to people than a houseful of plastic. That's right—in the future the typical American house is going to be filled with ideas instead of creature comforts. Now that would be quite a stupefying transformation, wouldn't it? I am aware that there's no trace of it at the moment, either in your friendly neighborhood suburb or the TV sitcoms, but I am certain that it's coming. Goodbye to houses full of stuff, hello to the unencumbered life. From Piscean excess to Aquarian thought in one easy astrological step.

But Aquarius means more than thinking and information. It also means home schooling, blogs, space travel, self-reliance, and libertarianism. Especially libertarianism. It is not surprising that within the past few years we have seen the beginnings of a libertarian political movement in this country (although at the moment most American libertarians tend to be as drearily corrupt as your average pork barrel pol). People who turn to libertarian politics are responding to Aquarian energies. My guess is that in the years to come, both the Republican and the Democrat parties will become obsolete. By the middle of the century all you're going to find are libertarians, ultra libertarians, and ne plus ultra libertarians. I'll end up as a card carrying member of the last. No more expecting Uncle Sam to be a nanny to the citizenry and solve their problems by throwing money at them. No more wanting our corrupt federal government to keep us cozy and contented in our warm little prison cells. Imagine that.

But this doesn't mean that we're heading into a world of me! me! me! selfishness. The new Aquarian age will also be an era of humanitarianism. It is important to remember that the word aquarius is Latin for water man. When ancient astrologers were trying to understand the energies of the Aquarian stars, they patterned them into a human being who wanted to give water to those who needed it. Aquarius is unique in the Zodiac in that he is a human figure who wants to help others. The water in the pitcher he holds is the water of regenerative life. Sigmund Freud once remarked that the secret to life was to work and to love. A perfect Piscean answer. In the Aquarian era, a better answer will be to think, to invent, and to help your fellow human beings. The greatest happiness in the Aquarian era will not come from the right partner or the next sale at Neiman Marcus, but from humanitarian efforts.

I also think that relations between the sexes are going to undergo a profound change. Pisces was a sign of duality, of two opposing forces going in different directions, which perfectly sums up male and female energies for the past two dismal millennia. Aquarius, however, is a holistic figure of indeterminate gender who is free of both duality and watery emotional turbulence. So what we now consider to be normal distinctions between male and female might eventually disappear. Have you noticed how popular it is these days to give an androgynous name to a child? Androgynous names for children were unheard of before the Second World War, but nowadays it feels perfectly natural to bestow a non-gender-specific name upon a new baby. Parents who do this are picking up on Aquarian energies, even though they don't consciously realize it. In the Aquarian era, being male or female won't matter as much as harmonizing the energies of both sexes within your own being. Of course, gender is a colossal issue in today's culture, reaching monomaniacal levels among certain bothersome feminists, but it might become a non-issue a few decades down the road, when the only thing that matters is a holistic sense of self.

Imagine that. No more moaning and groaning about how those creatures in trousers want to keep us women barefoot and pregnant. Us women, remember, have as many male energies within us as female, and if we're smart we will make use of them. This is the old idea of the alchemical marriage, where opposites are conjoined within our psyche so that we can live our lives in a state of wholeness. Don't forget that the potential for psychic balance exists in everyone. You find it everywhere in the greatest artists and writers, and most especially in Shakespeare. His ability to create vivid female characters must have come from the distinctly feminine energies he had within. Said Coleridge: "a great mind must be androgynous".[74] We are not men and women as much as we are entities. Anyone disturbed by people turning androgynous is hanging on to an exhausted Piscean dualism. Me, I don't want to do guy things like dress in a suit or watch pro-football, but I realize that I cannot be a wholly integrated human being without masculine qualities like logic and reason in my life. These kinds of Aquarian changes are already with us, and if you try to resist them you are going to exhaust your energy fighting the flow.

I like to think that the new Aquarian energies could bring about the most revolutionary transformation that our tired planet has ever known. I also think that it will be increasingly difficult to be a fanatic or a True Believer about anything in the years to come. True Believers must always distort reality to prop up their belief systems, which isn't that easy to do in a world where information is readily available. If you make a false statement about anything or anyone in cyber reality these days, somebody somewhere, usually somebody with a blog, immediately pounces upon it and shows it to be the distortion that it is. Thank heavens for blogs! In the great blogosphere which now blankets the earth, any lie or distortion for the sake of the political/social/media/religious agenda of choice gets exposed. For the first time in human history it is becoming easier to find the truth. George Orwell believed that in spite of shifting perspectives and confused information, decent men and women can discover what is true in the world and act decisively on it. Nowadays we can see he was right, thanks to the phenomenon of the blog. Janet, I'm sure you have your favorite blogs, as I do myself. If there is any place on planet earth where you can find truth, you find it in blogs. The Net today is full of thoughtful people who not only can write with clarity but who simply will no longer tolerate the lies and the evasions that True Believers produce, up to and including the endless distortions you get from the main stream American media. When computers are as widespread all over the world as they are in this country, the world is going to change.

But the most profound changes will be in the realm of the spirit. Let us remember that Aquarian energies are going to generate not just independent political thought, but independent spiritual thought as well. As far as I'm concerned a world filled with self-guided spiritual seekers instead of church-goers or head-bangers will be another step in the right direction. Here at the beginning of the 21^st century we are already seeing people who have decided to take charge of their own spirituality, and I feel certain that these kinds of seekers will become more numerous as the years go on. I also feel that spiritual self-reliance will become more common as human consciousness continues to expand, especially if people learn how to develop their latent psychic abilities. I am convinced that each one of us possesses some very practical psychic skills, which we can utilize if we only make an effort. In the Aquarian world to come, the ability of even the most average person to discern spiritual realities or foresee future events will become widespread. This will be a logical continuation of the ways in which human consciousness has already expanded thanks to cyberspace. And who needs a pumpum when you can do it yourself?

A self-guided spirituality will also, by the way, rid the world of those infantile losers known as terrorists. One of the mistakes our political leaders are currently making is their attempt to contain Islamic fanaticism through the use of military power. I've got news for them—they don't have to bother. In the years to come, Islamic fanaticism will inevitably be destroyed, but not with guns and bullets. It will bite the dust thanks to YouTube, MySpace, FaceBook, MTV, Twitter, Pogo, and the other hot sites on the Net. When Middle Eastern kids have as much access to the Internet as kids do here, they're going to have something better to do than listen to antiquated mullah crap. Good for them. And given a choice between seventy-two uneducated fourteen year olds and Nintendo . . . well, there's no contest.

As for the increasingly meaningless Piscean ceremonials which organized religion has dished out for the past two thousand years . . . well, I expect they will eventually become nothing but an historical curiosity. Sitting and watching some kind of dramatic performance, whether in church or Neo-Pagan ritual, isn't going to work for Aquarians, who will want to absorb some kind intellectual energy with their spirituality. The Quaker idea of the meeting house might provide us with a model here. The original Quakers eliminated all religious rituals from their assemblies and even got rid of the idea of a church. They came together in meeting houses, and that is what they proceeded to do: have a meeting. Whoever felt the urge to speak during these meetings, whether male or female, simply got up and spoke. That was it. Nothing more was needed. In other words, this was a perfect Aquarian spiritual gathering: a group of people who came together as friends to discuss spiritual experiences. If you ask me, this could become the religious ceremony of the future. Churches, mosques, and temples will become museums unless they are rearranged so that people can sit facing one another and exchange ideas.

What about an Aquarian divine concept? Should we expect that Aquarians will invent their own personal version of the Divine, the way countless generations have done since time immemorial? One cringes at the thought. Well, with any luck, maybe the human race has finally gotten past the need to conceptualize the Divine. No more divine concepts defined by gender, race, or culture. No more delusions that my divine concept is gonna lick your divine concept. No more divine concepts talking in Ye Olde Englishe. No more divine concepts talking, period. If there is any way to conceptualize Divinity in the Aquarian era, it will be in the most general terms, the Divine as an Absolute, nothing more and nothing less. Which is not such a bad way to define the Divine. Let us also remember that in the Aquarian age, expanded information and rational thinking are going to get you to the Divine, not weepy sentiment or subservience to a pumpum. I have always liked the idea of an independent spirituality based upon on rational thought. You had this kind of spirituality in Classical Greece and Renaissance Italy, both of which were vibrant and thriving cultures. This kind of spirituality is already starting to happen when you see people strengthening their spirituality from what they read in books or what they get from the Net.

All this will be yet another way to find new freedom. In the Aquarian age, what will be most valued will be what is most free. Especially the freedom of thought and imagination. I doubt that any kind of freedom that we have known in the Piscean era, whether political or spiritual, can give us an indication of the kind of wide-open spaciousness coming in the Aquarian era. This will be yet another blessing which increased information and knowledge will bring to us. Emerson's idea of never getting trapped by the dead hand of the past might finally become a reality, not just for an oddball like myself, but for millions.

Having said all of this, I must admit that nothing is perfect, and that goes for Aquarian energies as well. The potential danger in the Aquarian world to come is that of excessive intellectualization. Aquarian energies might bring on a kind of air overload, where the only thing that seems real is thought or communication. The danger here is that of people existing only in words, without a sense of the body or the spirit. This would make for a life filled with nothing but dry, cerebral arrogance. In the Aquarian era people are going to have to work at balancing out their air energy with earth, fire, and water. Fortunately you can counter air energy in a zillion different ways, by physical exercise, by dance, by good cooking, or by gardening. I sometimes wonder if air-headed Aquarian intellectuals might prove to be as repellent as water-brained Piscean fanatics. From the True Believer to the True Rationalist wouldn't be progress. But I always remember that Aquarians will come equipped with that jug of humanitarian water. Maybe in the Aquarian era the intellect will be balanced with the body, with the senses, with the heart and the spirit, with laughter, and with music. Let's keep our fingers crossed. Anything is better than what we've got now.

Janet, I suspect you might be getting uneasy at this point. What I am saying is that religion as we've known it for two millennia is about to vanish. This might be a terrifying thought. You will naturally assume that the death of Islam or Christianity will leave a tremendous void. And you would legitimately wonder how people are supposed to survive without a time-honored religious system, not to mention a traditional divine concept. How would they know how to live if scripture is no longer a reliable guide? What will they do in a world without religious rituals, pumpums, or promises of eternal bliss? Won't humanity collapse into a nihilistic void of meaningless? How the heck is any kind of human spirituality going to survive in the world to come?

Well, isn't it obvious?

Mona

* * *

September 9

Dear Niece:

Well, so all of a sudden you've got a new boyfriend. You tell me his name is Greg, his specialty is graphic design, and he's studied at Parsons in New York. You've had three dates with him, and the two of you are agreeing about everything, up to and including the superiority of Thai to Chinese cuisine. Janet, honey . . . what on earth am I going to do about you? After everything I've recently said about excessive Piscean emotionalism, the minute you meet a drop-dead Alpha male all of your marbles vanish into outer space.

Well, so be it. I can see this is something I cannot fight. Greg sounds wonderful. You were lucky to find him. If he's a good church-going Christian of the correct denomination, I'm sure your mother will be ecstatic. I wish you all the happiness in the world.

Now that your future is settled, I'm sure you don't need anything more from me, and especially no more nonsense about flying the friendly skies.

Cheers.

Mona

* * *

September 10

What? You mean you'll come after me with a sawed-off shotgun unless I get back to dishing up the dirt—or at least the levity? Especially since it sounds like I am finally getting somewhere? Janet, I must confess to a certain bewilderment. Now that you've hooked up with the great love of your life, or a reasonable facsimile thereof, you surely don't need anything else from me. Can it be possible that you are still in quest of information? How very Aquarian of you. You can have my laptop when you pry it from my cold dead fingers is a distinctly Aquarian pronouncement. Not even your average Alpha male can compete with the desire for information these days.

All right, so we will go back to the broomstick. Well, now I've got to remember where I was exactly. Something about . . .

Ah, yes—the wonderful Aquarian world to come. We were talking about what people are supposed to do if traditional religion evaporates into thin air. This is a scary thought. If things develop as I'm predicting, what's going to happen to churches and temples and mosques, not to mention sacred scripture and six-figure pumpum salaries? Won't the loss of formal religions create a world filled with endless horror? Am I looking forward to it all going poof? You bet your sweet life I am. If you ask me, it will be a step in the right evolutional direction. My vision of a religionless future is a very optimistic one. In the Aquarian world to come, if you are able to kick your untenable belief system out of your life, there most definitely is something better you can replace it with, namely philosophy. I feel certain that as we move ever further away from Piscean energies, people are going to transform themselves from believers into philosophers. Philosophy is going to be what matters in the new world to come, and it will be enough to satisfy humanity's spiritual yearnings.

What was that again? Philosophy? Am I kidding?

Janet, I suspect you are telling yourself that this sounds like another of my tedious jokes. After everything I've said about letting go of the past and freeing yourself from dead belief systems, can I possibly be recommending philosophy? As in Plato or Descartes? The kind of stuff they make you read in your sophomore year at college? You should be aware that one of the cardinal tenets of my youth was that you should never pay attention to the crap in dead books. People were reading books way back then, but they sure as heck weren't reading the kind of garbage produced by creeps like David Hume. Nowadays people don't use the term dead books as much as the patriarchy, all the crap that has been written for millennia by Dead White European Males. But here I must relate an interesting anecdote. Seven or eight years ago I noticed that I had started to behave strangely. Scratch that. I noticed that I was behaving even more strangely than usual. This small moment of self-awareness came to me one evening when it was time to decide what book to read after dinner. I found myself reaching for Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, a copy of which I had recently purchased at a rummage sale. Until that evening I had been making my way through yet another Robert Heinlein opus, but here I was, wanting to read . . . Aristotle! I felt as though I had been clobbered by a baseball bat. Good grief, Aristotle—the ultimate frozen limit of Dead White European Males! How was it possible that someone like me, who had spent many long years studying yoga, Zen, and Daoism, could touch one of those ghastly head-locked texts out of the Western philosophical tradition? What did I think I was doing?

But I realized that the Western philosophical tradition was all that I was reading anymore. I had started picking up philosophical texts wherever I could find them. I read Plato's Symposium, the letters of Epicurus, the Enchiridion of Epictetus, the essays of Montaigne, and the books of Thomas Paine. I had taken a look at David Hume for the first time in my life. I had even perused some of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and found it interesting. Even enjoyable. Even valuable. Not that I've finished it yet, but I definitely intend to since I'm dying to find out how it ends. It occurred to me—and pay attention since this is one of the supremely epiphanic moments of my life—that maybe it would be a better idea to get philosophy from philosophers instead of from cookbooks. All those dreary old philosophers had started to get interesting.

The more I read, the more interested I got. As the months went by I started to spend my evenings with Boethius or Marcus Aurelius instead of the Moosewood Cookbook. I took out a subscription to a philosophy magazine. I signed on to philosophical mailing lists. I figured out what epistemology meant. I purchased a used edition of the Macmillan Encyclopedia of Philosophy which had been only slightly chewed up by somebody's dog. One evening I even found myself reading Cicero. Cicero instead of Huang Po! Was it really me reading this stuff? How was that possible? I finally figured it out—I was getting clobbered by Aquarian energies. Unlike the days of my youth, when eastern meditative techniques seemed like the ultimate spiritual answer, I was craving concepts and ideas. I was searching for meaning which could be communicated to me through language. For the first time in my life, the great classics of western philosophy had started speaking to me. And I quickly discovered that they were making more of a difference in my life than any Zen koan I had ever come across. What is a koan anyway, but a kind of wordless jolt that will supposedly get you to the phantom called enlightenment? A perfect Piscean washout, in other words.

This conclusion led to another interesting revelation, namely that if Zen were such a specifically Piscean phenomenon, maybe witchcraft was one, too. By this time I had concluded that all contemporary religions were not so much universal in time and place as they were specifically Piscean. Could this be true for witchcraft as well? The answer was a plain yes. Nothing was going to be more out of date in the Aquarian era than witchcraft, especially its decadent late-Piscean form as Goddess worship. I could still grow my herbs and gaze at the autumn moon, but there was no point any longer in casting spells, making circles, waving a magic wand, or indulging in any other kind of slimy Piscean crap. I had finally figured out how to stop being a dysfunctional witch: you stop being a witch. But if I stopped being a witch, then—then—what was I? Simple. In the Aquarian era, what you need to be is a philosopher. If you're wondering what to do with yourself if you eliminate religion, scripture, divine concepts, and even witchcraft from your life, this is what's left: philosophy. An intellectual and egalitarian spiritual system which can provide you with a way to find meaning in your life. You want spiritual liberation? All you have to do is turn yourself into a philosopher.

Here I must pause. Am I really saying that in the Aquarian era people will be satisfied with philosophy instead of religion? After all, most people go through their lives loaded down with spiritual desires which are of great, if not supreme, importance to them. They also yearn for that blissful eternity which the pumpums of the earth are continually promising. Am I claiming that these longings can be satisfied by philosophy? Philosophers are mere human beings, nothing more and nothing less, and mere human being can only achieve a limited knowledge of life and the universe. Can an intellectual system which is based only on fallible speculation answer all our spiritual yearnings? Indeed, it can. Janet, you need to remember what life was like before the Piscean era. It is true that religion of a sort did exist in classical antiquity. People believed in the reality of their gods and attended their religious ceremonials, but this was only a minor part of their lives. Philosophy was the center of the ancient Greek soul. The Greeks turned to their philosophers instead of their pumpums for guidance on how to achieve fulfillment in life. When and if a thoughtful human being converted to anything in the Arian era, he or she converted to philosophy, and women did it as much as men. Conversion in those days didn't mean switching religions, changing deities, reforming the ceremonies, explicating the scriptures, or hooking up with a new pumpum. People simply began to practice philosophy.

It is interesting to remember that the Greeks actually managed to live their philosophies. Unlike the philosophers of today, ancient Greek thinkers didn't slog through messy and chaotic personal lives. Philosophy was a practice. It was something to be lived. And what a life it was! The Greeks were the first people in history to find joy in life, to consider their physical existence a delight and to realize that the things of this world are beautiful. If you study start studying anything about Greek culture, you find pleasure and delight, beauty and simplicity, all thriving in an illuminated world where things could be seen clearly. They say the light in the Greek isles is unequalled anywhere in the world, and the people somehow seemed to absorb this light right into the depths of their souls. Nothing creates a sense of freedom or happiness like this kind of fully balanced world-view. Life can be good when people are interested in pursuing wisdom instead of going brain-dead about what may or may not exist in the invisible.

But I'm sure you're still not convinced. Just studying Platonic dialogues or conversing with like-minded souls at the Stoa doesn't sound like much of anything. Didn't people in antiquity care about salvation or eternal bliss? Didn't they hunger for revelation from the Divine? Didn't they need a divine concept which did some talking, provided scriptures, and organized ceremonies? No, they didn't, not that I can see. These nuisances are specifically Piscean manifestations which never had any importance for people until the earth started being glutted by copious quantities of electromagnetic Piscean energies.

Now you must understand that I don't want to jettison the eternity which the pumpums of this world are continually promising us. I don't want to think that my consciousness is only an accidental conglomeration of atoms which will cease to exist when I do. But if I do want to get myself into an eternity which may or may not be coming after my death, philosophy is a better way to do it than all the religions, all the meditating, and all the ceremonies ever devised. It's the True Believers who have created most of the horrors of human history, not the philosophers—or at least not the philosophers who lived in the Arian era. Where in classical antiquity could you find a philosopher who instigated a war, burned a child alive, constructed a gas chamber, established a reeducation camp, slit his wrists for the sake of l'amour, or slaughtered thousands in the name of an invisible deity? Such people didn't exist, not by a long shot. Philosophers have to do a lot of thinking, both about themselves and about life in general, which means that they can't help being more self-aware, more skeptical, and more careful in their choices than those True Believers who never miss a ritual. If you're a philosopher you can't settle down into a complacent rut where continual crimes in support of your belief system must be tolerated. All of which means that in the Aquarian era to come our tired old planet might start being rejuvenated by people who are more concerned with ethics and values instead of belief. Imagine that.

Mind you, I am talking about philosophers of classical antiquity, not the kind of brain-dead philosophical phonies we have seen for the past two thousand years. In the Piscean era there has been little difference between the philosopher and the theologian. I am talking about the kind of idiots who wasted tremendous gallons of unreadable ink in religious speculation, specifically Christian speculation (the other religions that the darker people believed in didn't count). We scoff at those medievalists who spent years trying to determine how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, but we're supposed to take theo-philosophers like St. Augustine, John Calvin, Cardinal Newman, or Martin Luther seriously. Talk about futility. None of these True Believers ever once managed to produce anything remotely resembling rational thought in their lives. They simply wasted their time and energy writing up descriptions of their own evidence-free belief systems. Maybe some of their stuff is true, maybe some of it isn't, but who will ever be able to say for sure? And why should we care?

There were, of course, a few philosophers in the Piscean era who tried to distance themselves from Christian dogma. Unfortunately rational thought and skeptical free thinking are as foreign to these guys as they are to any True Believer you care to name. What you find in the more agnostic Piscean philosophers are men and women whose lives were out of control, who throve on resentment, jealousy, and other kinds of messy emotionalism, who made disastrous personal choices, and who could not see either themselves or the world around them with any kind of clarity. Their influence has been pernicious, catastrophic, and murderous. I would include here Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche, two horrendously poisonous thinkers who were howling mad about practically everything. No way did they resemble a Lao-tzu living in harmony with nature, let alone a Socrates who wanted to question everything. These two idiots spent their entire lives spewing forth endless theories of desperation and confusion, which culminated in fantasies about übermensch or the working class. We know what happened when assorted True Believers took up Marx's nonsense—maybe one hundred, two hundred million dead, give or take a few million. His babblings have mostly been discredited these days, but Nietzsche remains an untouchable sacred cow, in spite of the fact that his most influential theories were nothing more than tiresome fantasies unsupported by critical observation. You read his ravings and wonder what planet he was living on. Nietzsche's daydreams about the will to power don't correspond to anything resembling real live human beings, past, present, or future. But they do make sense as the pipe dreams of a timid academic living his shriveled life in a series of rented rooms. The words which he put onto paper led directly to Auschwitz, just as Marx's led to Kolyma and the Cambodian killing fields. Only the most brain-dead Piscean idiot thinks otherwise.

It is no exaggeration to say that in the 20^th century western philosophy just flat-out collapsed. This century gave us a new phenomenon: the philosopher as killer. For the first time in history you could find philosophers who either recommended slaughter or did it themselves. Martin Heidegger, one of the most influential philosophers of the 20^th century, never lost his admiration and enthusiasm for the Nazi regime. As rector of Freiburg University, he had no problem accommodating himself with his Nazi bosses when Hitler came to power. He did not hesitate to carry out assorted anti-Semitic edits, willingly dismissed all those irritating Jewish faculty (who cared how they were supposed to survive?), and supported various propaganda efforts. After the war, the man was still capable of proclaiming his respect for the "inner truth and greatness" of German National Socialism, even with the spectacle of Buchenwald staring him in his face.[75] So here we have the single greatest example of evil in human history, that of German Nazism, and perhaps the single most influential philosopher of the 20^th century totally enamored by it. Go get 'em, killer!

Alas, he was not an isolated example. If you take a look at other 20^th century western philosophers, you find many other equally miserable figures. The most famous are French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, who strangled his wife (it was probably for her own good), and Michel Foucault, who was so ticked off when he learned that he had AIDS that he was determined to infect as many other men as he could (it was undoubtedly for their own good). Heroic figures are they indeed and to this day highly revered in American academe. Aw, come on, Mona! Why should you expect sophisticated metrosexual academics to reject these towering intellects because of a little spilled blood? Have you forgotten that everything is relative? So what if a little lust for blood is a distinct characteristic of late Piscean philosophers?

Lust for blood, or lust for power. All throughout the 20^th century, during decade after miserable decade, the human race got to observe an endless number of allegedly high-minded philosophers bowing down before the most horrendous political tyrants. Put an absolute tyrant, preferably of the Marxist variety, in front of a 20^th century philosopher, and what you see is the kind of ass-kissing that should have disappeared from the planet several centuries ago. This is only to be expected from the kind of self-indulgent, head-locked types who never manage to assert themselves in their lives. Jean-Paul Sartre is a classic example. Sartre, with his emphasis on authentic living and personal liberation, ought to be a philosopher whom I can admire. However, the man was nothing more than yet another emotional loon, who expended his energies not so much in a search for truth but in a frantic emotional scramble for power. He spent his life either lusting after it or bowing down before it, whether it came from German Nazis, Russian Leninists, or Chinese Marxists. In Vichy France Sartre had to submit his plays to the Gestapo censor in order to get them produced, and he did not hesitate to do so. I've sometimes wondered what this must have been like, sitting down and filling out a Gestapo permission form, and then waiting expectantly for the Third Reich seal of approval. We're talking Gestapo here. Sartre had no problem bowing down before them the way he would eventually bow down before Comrade Fidel or Chairman Mao—and was he supposed to care that the good Chairman totals up as the biggest mass murderer in human history, with a good 70+ million dead? I guess I'm being silly again. Mao and his comrades had the kind of clout Sartre was desperate to acquire throughout his entire existence, and if that meant groveling, then grovel he would.

Then there was the primary woman in Sartre's life: Simone de Beauvoir, to this day somehow regarded as a pioneering feminist and a philosopher in her own right. Well, there is nothing I like more than the idea of a woman philosopher, but let's make them self-reliant Hypatias, not clinging Pisceans messes like de Beauvoir. Her relationship with the celebrated Jean-Paul exhibited all the aspects of pathological Piscean emotionalism at its worst. She was determined to hang on to the creep in spite of what he did to her, and what he basically did throughout their decades-long relationship was treat her like shit. Why did this allegedly independent woman stand for it? Maybe she thought she was nothing without a man? Even though the man in question had to be continually supplied with attractive young women in order, presumably, to feel like a man? De Beauvoir got to spend a good percentage of her adult existence shoving female sex-objects into Jean-Paul's power-crazed sack. In other words not only was she Sartre's doormat, she was his procuress as well. Sometimes I've wondered if I would have found a permanent man in my life if I had made the same deal de Beauvoir made with Sartre—honey, you talk to me in four-syllable words, and I'll bring home the chicks. Nah . . . that doesn't even qualify as a Faustian bargain. Admirers of these two repellent egos still can't figure out why Sartre didn't leave a will, an action which prevented de Beauvoir from accessing his archives after his death. Surely he must have realized that cutting her off from his estate would humiliate her in the eyes of the entire world? Well, if you've spent your life wiping your feet on your partner, it's only predictable that you will spit in her eye when you breathe your last—a human truth that de Beauvoir never quite figured that out. A few years after the famous man's death she made arrangements to be buried in the same grave with him, and the cemetery officials were more than happy to oblige. So now she gets to spend eternity being the one on top, and presumably nobody is going to remember that the fellow underneath left all his money and papers to another woman. Talk about two fools who deserved each other. More decadently Piscean than this a relationship doesn't get.

This kind of relentless Piscean turmoil is not limited to German or French philosophy—it is also evident in what ought to be more level-headed 20^th century philosophy, especially the Anglo-American variety. One of the key concerns of 20^th century Anglo-American philosophy has been language, which is hardly an emotional kind of thing. But show me an alleged philosopher who is determined to prove that language constructs are the only reality we can ever know, and I'll show you a human being so vulnerable to emotional turmoil that he has to shut out vast quantities of human reality. The 20^th century was plagued by huge numbers of British logical positivists who were frantically desperate to take refuge in nothing but words. They closed their minds to all other aspects of human existence, most especially the unpredictability of physical world and the limitations of the human body. One can only stare in bafflement at the tomes these word-obsessed philosophers produced over the years. Are they worth reading? Believe it or not, I've actually tried. It feels like sticking needles into your eyeballs.

At the top of the 20^th century Brit/American heap stands Bertrand Russell, a crazy mixed-up kid who spent ninety arrogant years making one lunatic emotional pronouncement after another, many of which urged bloodshed of one kind or another. Forget Russell's Principia Mathematica—if you want to know what kind of a man he was, take a look at the glowing reports of Stalin's gulags he produced in the 1930s. By the late 1940s, however, Russell had a change of heart and was urging NATO to immediately declare preemptive nuclear war upon those ghastly Bolshies in the Soviet Union, presumably so that Western civilization would survive.[76] Still later in the 1960s, he became one of the earliest practitioners of the European religion known as anti-Americanism, and this time his political comments were so demented that some people believed he was secretly trying to make the Left look bad. One of Russell's books is entitled The Conquest of Happiness. Not that his lordship, whose personal life was endlessly chaotic, ever experienced the sensation of happiness for more than two or three seconds in his ninety years, but that wasn't going to stop him from telling us rabble how to get it, and naturally for our own good.

Then there was Ludwig Wittgenstein, who is still inexplicably admired. You don't normally think of Wittgenstein as a human being boiling over with horrendous emotional turmoil, but I can't think of any other way to describe him. The man spent his entire life in desperate flight from anything sensual, anything female, anything that existed outside of his arid little world of logical words. When there's no emotion, all there is is emotion. I have tried to read his two books. Good grief. His Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is supposed to be some kind of culmination of the Western philosophical tradition. So here I am, a reasonably intelligent nonprofessional, trying to make sense of this stupefying drivel, but only discovering yet one more Piscean dead end. "What we cannot speak about," pronounces Wittgenstein at the culmination of his culmination, "we must pass over in silence".[77] Was he kidding? This is the culmination of western philosophy? Not that I can see, but it is another Piscean washout. Wittgenstein didn't reach any kind of ultimate philosophical climax—he simply talked himself into the Buddhist void.

As for all those other logical positive fuddy duddies, whose self-awareness was zero, whose love of wisdom came down to scribble, scribble, scribble, who never managed to convey any kind of idea with clarity or humor . . . give me a break. These rigor mortis guys are walking cesspools of frantic passions, as fanatical in their dreary way as any early Christian martyr you care to name. They didn't get just some things wrong, they got everything wrong. If you take a look at the constipated faces of 20^th century philosophers, you don't see much of anything that looks interesting. A date with one of these guys? Eating a meal with one of them? Would it have helped to pour Kickapoo Joy Juice down their throats? Janet, do you remember what happens in Plato's Symposium? Another bunch of opinionated guys, but at least they managed to eat. The Symposium takes place at a banquet. That would never happen with 20^th century Anglo philosophers, who can't notice anything which isn't a word. Show me a personality who lives solely in words, drowns in words, focuses on nothing but words, spews forth nothing but words, whose entire existence is nothing but words, and you can bet your sweet life all his words are worthless. Against the whole arrogant, head-locked crew of logical-positivist twats, I can only cry—give me Moosewood! Overwhelm me with Alice Waters! Let me sit down to a good home-cooked meal and actually enjoy it! Piccalilli! Pumpkin pie! Sourdough bread! Wherefore art thou, Elizabeth David? In the kitchen enjoying her life, I dare say, instead of drowning in words.

Well, the heck with Piscean philosophers. Let us now try to imagine what the world might be like with Aquarian philosophers instead. In the Aquarian era, remember, thinking is going to matter, not emotion. So the lunatic emotional turmoil which still infects late Piscean philosophy might soon vanish from the earth, along with its pointless theological speculation and agenda wallowing. Philosophers might finally understand that they are fallible human beings and living in an imperfect world, so there will not be any point in paying attention to absolutist belief systems. Instead, they might start focusing on classic philosophical values—those of truth, ethics, and personal integrity. Out of the water into the light. Wow, talk about a different kind of world.

These kinds of changes are already starting to happen. Have you noticed the popularity of philosophy clubs these days? People are starting to come together to discuss philosophy. This has become a more interesting thing to do than watch television or drink beer. Imagine that. Now here's a major shift if ever there was one—heading off to the philosophy club instead of the bowling alley. Recreational shopping giving way to recreational thinking. Wine, men, and song mutating into caffeine, philosophy, and computers. Plain evidence of the shift into Aquarius right before our eyes. Who knows what might be coming next—maybe even the philosophy center replacing the entertainment center in your average American home, the American male reading John Locke instead of heading off to the ball game, a discussion of ethics or reason mattering more than vacations or creature comforts . . .

And wouldn't it be nice if there were a change in human relationships as well? When boy meets girl in the Aquarian age, no more Piscean lunacy—they won't even have to meet cute. This will definitely be my idea of progress. In the Aquarian era, marriages will no longer be in thrall to soggy emotionalism but will be based upon rational or humanitarian vision. Maybe in a few years I'm crazy about her will be replaced by she exhibits such insight into Kant's vision of transcendental unity. Given the fact that I'm crazy about her sometimes degenerates into it wasn't my fault that I stabbed her—that worthless bitch was ruining my life, this will definitely be another step forward in human evolution. Love isn't going to matter in a world where the greatest pleasure is intellectual. In the Aquarian era, philosophy will make the world go round. Philosophy will make you happy. All you need is philosophy. What the world needs now is philosophy, sweet philosophy. You're nobody 'till somebody theorizes you. Is you is or is you ain't my empiricist? That's why I analyzed the leader of the pack. So long Jean-Paul and Simone, hello Speusippus and Axiothea.

No, I haven't lost my mind—I'm simply describing the world before it was engulfed in Piscean emotionalism. This brings me back to the idea of dead books. For all that I adhere to Emerson's emphasis on self-reliance, I must admit that you can learn things of value from other human beings. Emerson himself continually quotes classical writers in his essays, which means that he never would have been the thinker that he was if he had not taken time to read a good number of dead books. The great minds of the past enriched his life, provoked his thinking, and constantly stimulated his genius. Certainly I don't want to let other people do my thinking for me, and I have long felt that hell is the values of other people, but trying to figure out the big questions of life by relying solely upon your own experience is a waste of energy. As long as you never let yourself get trapped by the iron hand of tradition, the thoughts and the ideas of past ages can prove to be of immense value.

So there can be value in dead books. Or at least dead philosophical books. Only though a long, arduous study of human civilization can you form any kind of a moral sense. If you don't want to turn into Heinrich Himmler, you have to know something about history, human behavior, and ethical consequences. I know I'm always stressing the necessity of bringing new space and ideas into your life, but as far as ethics are concerned, I tend to be a rock-solid conservative. In the ethical realm what is oldest is usually what is best. You need to know how people have wrestled with moral questions throughout the ages if you want to live a decent life. This kind of knowledge is of especial necessity if you decide to throw out everything that has passed for sacred scripture over the years. As much as I have always admired the Quakers for their spiritual independence, I don't think that trusting your inner light is good enough for a solid ethical sense. Don't ever think about lighting out for the Territory unless you take along a fair share of dead books with you. Long live dead books!

Janet, here I must digress for a moment. I expect that the one thing which will be of supreme value in the Aquarian era will be books, whether paper or digital. What people will want in the Aquarian era will be the thoughts and opinions of other human beings. We are going to return to the idea that books are living beings which can impart great insight to us. What is a sage, after all, but a human being who has arrived at wisdom not only through his own efforts, but through his study of the old masters? In ancient China it was never enough for a hermit to sit alone in the wilderness and contemplate the natural world around him—he had his books with him. Highly intelligent thinking here. If you want to acquire wisdom of any kind, you need more than your own experience of life—you need books. Books can change your life, expand your awareness, enrich your personality, give you a new sense of self, and liberate your soul like nothing else on earth. What is the act of reading a book anyway, but a kind of dialogue of soul with soul? To come into contact with the treasures of a great mind can be one of the most transforming encounters you can experience. You can live a successful life in corporate America without ever opening up a book, you can get rich, you can give off all the evidence of what passes for accomplishment in our culture, but you will never live a truly soul-enriching life without encountering the treasures to be found in books. Mind you, I am not talking about light reading, or indulging in the stupidities of brain-dead pulp fiction. Instead I am talking about the kind of intense contemplative interchange between your own soul and that of a richly reflective mind, the kind of human who has pondered deeply about the world and developed some kind of coherent vision. Blend your own soul with a soul like this, and you feel like you've walked into a lighted room. The best possible way to escape chaotic emotional turmoil is by reading, anything and everything that looks interesting or informative, reading not for information but to enrich your character and give you goals to strive for.

The act of reading can also be a meditative experience. Is there anything as delightful as losing yourself in a good book? I'm talking about letting your ego evaporate in the best Zen fashion so that nothing seems to remain. This is the most enjoyable kind of ego surrender that there is. Start absorbing the words of a truly supreme genius, and he or she will transport you through a magic portal into an extraordinary new universe filled with meaning and truth. I have always pitied people who don't know how to lose themselves in a good book, particularly the kind of book which portrays an atmosphere utterly different from the kind of mundane reality we usually know. Surrender yourself to a supremely good book, and if you are willing to experiment with what you learn from it, you will start living a better kind of life, with mind and spirit unfettered and free.

Mind you, this can only happen with the deepest kind of reading, where you are not so much idly looking at the words as you are absorbing every syllable and punctuation mark into your own being. This is the creative way to read, a kind of slow, lingering immersion in the words on the page, where you pause over them, reflect on them, and assimilate every shade of their meaning into your own soul. The right kind of book can almost become an alchemical experience where your normal reality is transmuted into a kind of unexpected splendor that can deepen and enrich every moment of your life. My own reading has always been liberatory. Whenever I have discovered a genuinely thoughtful writer, a man or a woman who has pondered deeply not just on their own experience but that of humanity as a whole, these kind of writers have always been able to move me into unexpected new ways of apprehending reality. The colors and the fabric of their vision are literally transforming. Maybe I've never been able to experience the world as Keats experienced it, but the simple fact of being acquainted with his poetry and his letters has enriched the quality of my own existence, right here in an ordinary town like Carver, Illinois.

All this brings me to the idea of wisdom. After so many years of fruitlessly pursuing enlightenment and/or mystical vision, nowadays I wish I had expended more energy pursuing wisdom instead. Mind you, I'm talking about genuine wisdom, the kind of plain old-fashioned horse sense that leads to a humane and healthy life in all its aspects. Not the alleged wisdom which comes from the theorizing which has plagued late Piscean philosophy, where fair is always foul and foul is hermeneutically fair. Nor am I talking about the mere accumulation of facts or knowledge, which cannot in themselves make you wise. I am talking about the kind of Socratic wisdom where nothing is ever settled, where you are always comfortable with flux and transformation, and where you leave the doors to the universe wide open. This is the wisdom of mental freedom where new possibilities can always manifest, and where you can even get a glimpse of other realities outside of space and time.

But the key to this is in keeping things rational. It is our reason which enables us to appreciate the words of our fellow human beings. I think that the human power to reason things out has done more for the human race than any kind of belief system, superstition, or emotion ever experienced. In my own life I can see that what has provided the greatest help in my own painful attempts at self-awareness have been those concepts which I have thought out rationally. Of course, in the Piscean era the human ability to reason things out was always on the defensive. Omar Khayyam, typical Piscean that he was, tells us that he "divorced old barren Reason" from his bed, presumably for the sake of getting plastered whenever he felt like it.[78] I don't think that this will be the preferred lifestyle choice in the Aquarian era, where we are going to find a new appreciation of the blessings that reason can bestow upon us.

This is not a popular notion here at the last gasp of the Piscean era, particularly in the touchy-feely world of compassionate nurturing feminism, where you are supposed to think with your uterus and get in touch with your feelings (but try telling any woman who's being stalked by an ex-husband that he needs to get in touch with his feelings, instead of rationally understanding his situation). I've always been wary of those feminists who are completely and utterly anti-rational. Show me a woman who has decided to jettison her powers of reason and intellect, and I'll show you complete idiot. Don't forget that reason is yet another thing that can liberate us—it frees us from the tyranny of dogma or belief, from the traps involved with repetitive or destructive behavior patterns, from useless traditions, and from unthinking subservience to authority. Being rational is not such a bad thing to be, even though it sometimes seems to be hormonally difficult for us women. It is also difficult for those highly intelligent ism believers who think they are using their reason when they apprehend the world but who are as much in thrall to their emotions as any Fundie you care to name. Rationalism forever! Critical thinking about everything! Our ability to reason is our only way to salvation. Those Zen masters who never read a book in their lives should have given it a try.

Courage, Janet! I've finally had my say about the blessings of Aquarian era to come. So all you need to know about getting off the ground on an Aquarian broomstick will finally come in my next email!

Mona

* * *

September 20

Well, phooey on you. Let me tally up the complaints my precious niece made in response to my last email:

1. You think my Aquarian vision is some kind of frivolous utopian fantasy.

2. It will never exist in human reality.

3. You don't see what any of this has to do with flying on a broom.

4. You want to remind me about the limitations of the power of reason. You tell me that reason is not enough to enable people to adequately interpret or experience life, let alone make the right ethical decisions.

All right, all right . . . I have to admit that to a certain extent you're correct. Maybe I am overly enthusiastic about the Aquarian future to come. The universe is not about to sprinkle star dust upon planet earth and immediately turn us human blockheads into reason-worshipping saints. Let us not forget that a man like Heinrich Himmler got to be a Reichfuhrer through his powers of reason. The man was an intellectual. He must have carefully deliberated every action he took in his life, in the most logical manner possible, right up to the establishment of the Gestapo, which was operated in a very efficient fashion. A fat lot of good the powers of reason did for him. The voice of reason can lead you astray as easily as anything else, especially if you're one of those swollen egos who pride themselves on their lack of emotionalism. I must also admit that our ability to make sense of the world is limited and imperfect, just like everything else in our lives. Que sais je? What do I know? asked the French philosopher Montaigne, a rationalist if there ever was one.[79] Well, what can anyone know? It is the ultimate vanity to think that our powers of reason can transcend our human limitations. If reason were able to solve everything, all those deep, fundamental questions about human existence would have been answered by now. This hasn't happened, as far as I can see. People in the 18^th century prided themselves on their rationality, but this was also the century when their inadequate world-view produced gothic literature, magical shysters like Cagliostro, and the blood-drenched horrors of the French Revolution. Pure abstract reason will never solve anything. And there is no better recipe for spiritual starvation than an arrogant rationalism.

Perhaps I had better explain that my vision of the Aquarian world is not predicated solely upon human rationality. That would make for a world out of balance. Janet, we are holistic entities, remember, who need to engender the alchemical marriage within our beings. We have to work at balancing the male and female energies within us, our yin and yang, our left brain and right. I'm sure you're aware that our left brain controls our rational side, the part of us which is practical, intellectual, and mathematical. But we have a right brain as well, the side which is concerned with music, reverie, rhythm, and dreams. The left brain is the scientist, while the right is the artist. Too much of the left and you get stressed out; too much of the right and you turn psychotic. What people need is a balance, with neither the left nor the right predominating. People use their rational mind in the fullest possible way only when they are also using their intuitive or imaginative mind as well. Don't forget that Bladud is a perfect balance between the classical and the romantic. This kind of equilibrium is something our human psyches need as well.

Good artist that you are, maybe it would help if I gave you a visual idea of the balance I'm talking about. You need to take a look at one of the supreme iconic artifacts in Western culture: Raphael's School of Athens. Everyone is familiar with this fresco—it is as famous as Michelangelo's Sistine ceiling or van Gogh's starry night. But I doubt that you have ever taken a really intense look at this picture in your life. Several years ago, about the same time I started reading Aristotle, I found myself getting interested in Raphael's masterwork. I even purchased a poster so I could examine the figures more closely. There is a lot more going on in the School of Athens than initially meets the eye. And it demonstrates everything that could possibly be coming in the new Aquarian world.

What you see in the School of Athens is a group of human beings who are possessed of supreme intellectual and spiritual force. They have come together in what is one of the most exhilarating architectural spaces ever imagined—it is some kind of elegant arena open to the boundless sky, which drenches everything with light. This is a space that somehow takes us out of our mundane existence into an inspired and life-enhancing realm. And take a look at the guys inhabiting it. You don't see arrogant egos determined to impose their will on humanity in this crowd, let alone MBA's out to make a buck. Nor do you see emotional wallow, mystical torpor, occult secrets, Zen mindlessness, post-modern hermeneutics, or mindless faith in absolutes. Instead what you discover are independent, alert, and thoughtful intellects, who are doing so much thinking that you can practically see the ideas flying through the air. Everyone is participating in a lively, animated exchange; nothing is settled. The two big shots at center stage, Plato and Aristotle, aren't agreeing about anything—they are obviously disputing their respective systems. What's even more interesting is that only a few members of the crowd are paying any attention to them. They are either lost in their own thoughts or directing their attention to others. All these guys are open, free, enthusiastic, and mentally on the move. The whole fresco is a perfectly balanced representation of spiritualized rationality, predicated on light and clarity. In other words the School of Athens is a supreme Aquarian dream made beautifully visible.

I find the faces of the figures endlessly fascinating. Everyone wants to learn, to understand, and to hear something new, even an older character like the guy in the orange robe to the right of Aristotle. The baldy with the beard. Now there's an interesting face. A date with a guy like this would definitely prove to be interesting. No talk of vacations, Jacuzzis, or basketball play-offs coming out of his mouth. Instead, you might get hear something intriguing about cosmic harmony, the destiny of humankind, the meaning of life . . . little things like that. Now why can't any of my dating services deliver a man like that?

What's especially intriguing about these figures is that you don't get a sense that their rationalism is going to run aground in a soul-deadening materialism. So why aren't these men being devoured by their intellects? Why do they possess so much more spiritual integrity than your average tenured academic? What do they have in their lives that makes for such intense aliveness? The answer can perhaps be found in the two deities presiding over the crowd, namely Apollo, the god of music and poetry, and Minerva, the goddess of wisdom. Their statues are visible in the background, but they are so faint that you have to look twice to notice them. Apollo and Minerva, male and female, stand together as equals. Both their spirits are presiding over the whole gathering, and both are necessary. Their presence makes perfect sense if you remember what forces these two deities represent: Apollo shows us the power of the right brain, while Minerva symbolizes the left. They tell us that you need music, imagination, and inspiration in your life as much as you need reason. Especially music. In Western culture music has been what meditation has been in the East, namely a revelation of the spiritual. I've always felt that a good old Brandenburg Concerto can provide you with more spiritual insight than anything you might get out of a meditation cushion. If you want to be a balanced human being as you move into the Aquarian era, you need to maintain equilibrium between your reason and your intuition. When this happens, you might find yourself living at a truly higher level of human existence.

Higher level of existence . . . My goodness, now what does that remind me of? A flying broomstick, of course. Yes, that is the whole point of these e-mails, getting a broomstick to fly. I can see that I have taken a very long time to finally reach my point. But I am here at last. When I finally figured out that in the Aquarian era what was going to matter was both reason and imagination, logic and intuition, philosophy and music . . . I knew at once how to get up into the air on Bladud. That's right. After all the innumerable peregrinations, pointless cogitations, wasted effort, foolish mistakes, wrong turns, and stupid guesses I had made, I suddenly knew with absolute certainty how I was going to get myself off the earth. No, I'm not going to make you wait for my next e-mail. I can tell you everything you need to know about upwardness right here and now in two words: Elvis Presley.

Are you lonesome tonight?

Mona

* * *

September 28

Janet, I will pass over your comments with the silence they deserve. But I must admit that I am not surprised to hear of your irritation. It was only to be expected. You wanted me to explain how to fly on a broomstick, and at long last I have finally done so. I should have realized that you would be immediately skeptical. Am I saying that Elvis Presley is what makes an Aquarian broomstick fly? Can I be serious? How did I get from the School of Athens to the King of Rock 'n Roll? Well, honey—it's time for you to put on your blue suede shoes. In the Aquarian era what will get you off the ground on the Bladud of your choice is none other than the King himself, Elvis Presley.

Now you must understand that this was as much a surprise to me as it must be to you. When I first set out on my quest for upwardness, never once did it occur to me that Elvis would be the solution to the broomstick conundrum. I mean, we're talking rock star here! Brainless American pop culture! Besides, it should be obvious that medieval witches would never have used Elvis Presley to make their broomsticks fly, for the obvious reason that there was no Elvis in the Middle Ages. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure that one out. Sure there were plenty of delightful things going on in the good old Middle Ages, such as the bubonic plague and the Inquisition, but there was no Elvis. Elvis is a distinctly 20^th century American phenomenon. It has not escaped my notice that we're not even in the 20^th century any more, let alone the Piscean era. What with all the fanatical emotions that he managed to generate, Elvis Presley is as Piscean as you can get.

But even now, when Aquarian energies are starting to bombard the planet, it is Elvis who does the upwardness trick. Janet, you need to remember my first major insight about a flying broomstick, namely that it must have been some kind of vehicle for spiritual liberation, just as Zen is a way of liberation. I have talked a lot in these e-mails about the things that can liberate you, such as living in the present, expanding your horizons, freeing your perceptions, exercising your creative potential, and, most delightfully, kicking the pumpum out of your life. These are very well and good. But none of them has ever had the impact of good old-fashioned rock 'n roll. Genuine rock music, with its aggressiveness, it anti-authoritarianism, its rebelliousness, and the way its rhythm can penetrate right into your guts, has had more impact upon more people than any other phenomenon in history—except perhaps earlier forms of American popular music, such as ragtime, blues, jazz, and swing. What won the Second World War was the Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy from Company B. A case could be made that it was the post-war Russian obsession with American jazz which destroyed Soviet Marxism. But it has been rock 'n roll which has knocked the brains out of billions. Mind you I am not talking about the lugubrious moans which pass for contemporary rock music, but the real thing, the kind of sound energy that can split your head right open. It is the greatest mind/body/spirit expanding phenomenon known in human history.

Rock, like most other forms of popular music, comes right out of the African-American experience with its devastating rhythms and honest lyricism. One place you can always find absolute truth is in African music. Forget American literature, painting, theater, and architecture—the supreme creative glory of this country has been African-American music in all its manifestations, up to and including rock. Life isn't worth living without this kind of music. If you ask me, the only reason there are still some people left in this country who refuse to be engulfed by corporate America comes from the sheer irrepressible energy of African-American sounds and rhythms. It was Elvis who brought African-American music to the rest of the planet. Before Elvis, said John Lennon, there was nothing—and he was right. Elvis, with his free rebellious energy, his gorgeous good looks, and his remarkable talent changed everything about our culture, not to mention the world. Post-war American culture was as puritanically straight-laced as any culture in history. You conformed, or else you didn't exist. Then Elvis came along, and people realized that it was okay to be wild, to wear what you want, do what you want, be what you want. Hearing him was like busting out of jail, said Bob Dylan. If you believe that forms and structures need to be periodically overthrown, or that people always need to find new ways of doing things, then you must revere Elvis. Elvis is the modern Prometheus.

And in his glory days he was a Prometheus who thrived on spiritual energy. That's right—I think that Elvis Presley was a spiritual leader equal to any who have ever walked the earth. Anyone can see that he possessed a kind of radiant other-worldly quality. You can hear it not only in the spiritual songs he recorded but in his regular rock songs which can knock you out cold. If all the galaxies, all the black holes, all the superstrings, all the atomic particles, and all the divine concepts ever created came together at one time and attempted to destroy Elvis, they wouldn't be able to manage it. It is written: nothing can destroy Elvis. Elvis lives! Elvis not only lives, but levs. And living should be leving, after all. So if you want to lev, you've got to Elvis. Observe the lev sound in the word Elvis. Well, yes—it's not quite a lev sound, it's slightly misspelled as elv. But as far as I'm concerned, they are clearly the same thing. Here at the millennium, elv is the solution to escaping gravity. No Aquarian broomstick anywhere on planet earth is going to rise one measly millimeter off the ground without the King.

Not that I figured any of this out right away. As I've already related, I wasted endless amounts of time studying all sorts of worthless arcane texts in my search for the right upwardness formula, not to mention that stupid summer when I decided to stuff myself with gooseberry fool. The elv/lev breakthrough came one evening when I was out in the backyard with Bladud, trying for the fiftieth time to say the right words to get the idiot contraption upwards. Ralph had joined me on this particular evening, which was quite unusual. Normally he hides under the bed whenever I start messing with Bladud, but on the evening in question Ralph had stretched himself out on the ground where he was watching me skeptically. He was also wagging his tail, which he always does when he's smug about something. The fact that I was meeting failure after failure in my attempts to lev seemed to be a source of much hilarity to him. The more I exerted myself, the more amused he got. I had, as usual, tossed off my shoes, straddled the broom, and grasped it with both hands like every illustration of a witch you've ever seen in your life, but I was going nowhere. Ralph continued to enjoy the spectacle. I confess I started to struggle with I'm going to kill that dog thoughts. And finally, without quite realizing it, I found myself uttering through clenched teeth: "You ain't nothin' but a hound dog."

Gasp! Horror! Shock! Bladud lurched in my hand!

I went cold with amazement. Had Bladud moved? Or had I only imagined it? I steadied myself and uttered the words a second time. And I immediately felt the broom give another lurch, as if an electric shock had passed through it. I had done it—I had found the right words to make Bladud come alive in my hands! I said the words again: "You ain't nothin' but a hound dog." Bladud jerked. I said them again. Bladud writhed. Again and again. Bladud moved, squirmed, and wiggled. He had become a living being in my hands—finally. It was as though the cosmos went kerboom. The words of the King had done it. I was ready to kick myself for my stupidity. How slow on the uptake can anyone be? The minute I had realized that a broom was a vehicle for spiritual liberation, the answer should have come to me: Elvis. But it had taken me years upon years to figure it out. Moron Mona.

So delighted was I at this juncture that for several minutes all I could do was repeat the words and enjoy feeling Bladud move in my hands. Then I realized something—we still weren't flying. The broom was finally alive and kicking, but my feet continued to be plastered to the cold solid earth. "Lev!" I cried. "Lev! Lev! Lev! Bladud, you ain't nothing but a leving hound dog!" Well, nothing. More jerks from Bladud, but zilch amount of upwardness. I immediately realized that the Elvis words weren't enough—the broomstick needed a more concentrated kind of Elvis energy. I raced back indoors, found my purse, and extracted my favorite key ring. There it was—my Elvis Presley pewter key ring. This was a trinket which I had purchased for twenty-five cents at a garage sale somewhere. It was a small metal rectangle with a profile of Elvis in red enameling. You can, of course, find plenty of Elvis stuff anywhere in this country. People are inundated by it; I bet everyone in America has an Elvis something. Whenever I find an Elvis trinket at a garage sale, I immediately snatch it up, although it had always been a mystery to me why some people want to unload their Elvis stuff. You'd think they'd realize what treasures they hold. Elvis stuff is something that you need to hang on to throughout your entire life. In spite of all this, yes, there are people in this world who occasionally want to get rid of their Elvis stuff, either at garage sales or on eBay. Talk about cretins.

At this moment, however, I knew the Elvis key ring was exactly what I needed. I raced back outdoors, slipped the ring over the end of the Heathclift shaft, steadied myself, and then again uttered the momentous words: YOU AIN'T NOTHIN' BUT A HOUND DOG. And before you can say jailhouse rock, there I was in the air, suspended maybe six feet above the ground, floating as easily as a soap bubble. The Elvis words coupled with the Elvis trinket had done the trick. "Whoa!" I gasped, struggling with fear and delight in about equal measures.

Immediately Bladud descended. That is to say, gently and easily he descended. I landed on the grass as if a gigantic hand were carefully placing me back on earth. Only then did it occur to me that I might have broken my neck. So obsessed had I been with getting up into the air that I had never once given any thought to getting down again. Obviously when you start flying on a broomstick, the landing matters as much as the take-off. How typical of me to get myself into the air without figuring out how to get back down again. The word whoa had done it. I had never been on a horse in my life, but this particular atavistic syllable had spontaneously erupted out of me the minute I was airborne. The broomstick had immediately whoaed.

It was time to try again. Hound dog gets you up, and whoa gets you down. I uttered the necessary words, and within a twinkling there we were again suspended a few feet above the ground. I said whoa, and down we went. For several minutes all I could do was go up and down like this. Bladud seemed to be perfectly acquiescent. He also seemed to be somewhat relieved that the solution had finally come to me for I could sense that up in the air was where he wanted to be. As soon as I had practiced this enough, it was time to fly. "Bladud," said I, "how about a turn around the yard?" And off we went, nice and slow. I could see that he was moving as carefully as he could so I wouldn't get spooked. He didn't try to ascend any higher than four or five feet off the ground, and we moved around the backyard with exquisite slowness. It was not uncomfortable for me to sit on the shaft since I seemed to be floating slightly above it, the way the broom itself was floating above the earth. The only contact I had with the shaft was with my hands as they gripped it, and I don't hesitate to mention that I was hanging on for dear life. Nowadays I realize that it is impossible to fall off a flying broomstick, but you are hearing about my first flight, and this particular insight had not yet come to me. Around and around the yard we went, smoothly and carefully. Each time we made a circle Bladud went faster and higher. I could tell he was breaking me in gently, for which I felt grateful. It seemed as though he knew exactly what he was doing. No trace of orneriness in this flawless broom. Bladud was quite simply the world's greatest flying broomstick.

At last, when it was almost too dark to see, we descended. I carefully placed him on the ground, and for a few moments I stood there on the grass getting my breath. To my surprise I realized that I didn't feel liberated—I just felt tired. Then I noticed that Ralph was freaking. So intently had I been concentrating on Bladud that I had not noticed how upset the dog had become. He was whimpering and gasping as if he were sick. When we went indoors, he continued, in a word, to dog my steps and wouldn't let me out of his sight. I finally had to sit down on the floor and cuddle him to calm him down—he was trembling. I must confess that I found this irritating. You'd think that my dearest dog might have wanted to share in my tremendous triumph, but all I was getting was sheer stupid canine perversity. When we eventually went to bed, sleep didn't come too easily that night with Ralph whining well into the night. Well, I figured he would get over it.

So ended my Broomstick Breakthrough day. I'm sure you have a lot of other questions, particularly about the technical aspects of take-offs and landings. But I'm tired tonight, as tired as my first evening airborne, and it will have to wait a few more days.

Mona

* * *

October 5

Sorry I couldn't get back to you this week. I'll try to write tomorrow.

Mona

* * *

October 8

Yes, I'm fine—but I can't write now. Something's happened. Too complicated for me to go into at the moment since I'm completely freaked. I'll try to get back to you on Saturday.

Mona

* * *

October 10

Thanks for your last e-mail. No, nothing is wrong—at least not now. But it has been an eventful week, and I am only slowly recovering from it. At least I've stopped eating the bananas. Janet, you must understand that I have had a shock to my nerves the likes of which I've never experienced in my life. Sooner or later I will return to my normal lighthearted self, but I wonder if I will ever recover. Oh, that broomstick, that ghastly broomstick! Why did I ever bother with it? Why can't I be a normal person and watch television on a Saturday night instead of zapping through the air? I suppose that I was asking for everything that happened, but that hardly lessens the horror of it all. Janet, you're going to have to hear every word about the entire experience, especially since it means that I'm never going to fly again.

Words fail me when I try to find a place to begin. Well, no—I mean yes, I mean I think maybe I do know how to begin, namely that it wasn't a dark and stormy night. It was Saturday night, two weeks ago, a magnificently clear night. No moon, no clouds, nothing but darkness and stars—a perfect night for upwardness. I hadn't managed to fly the previous weekend, but this was one of the most luscious nights for a flight that I had ever seen, and I wasn't about to pass up the chance that the sky was offering me. So shortly after midnight up Bladud and I went. Ralph predictably tried to dissuade me once he realized that this was going to be a flying night, even going so far this time to nip me on the heel when I went out the back door. As usual I ignored him. I had become so accustomed to his dislike of Bladud that I hardly bothered to notice. I should have realized that this was not just an irritation from the idiot dog, but a portent of unmitigated doom.

But no, that's not me, I don't pay attention to portents. I'm a rationalist—right? No to mention a pragmatist and an empiricist. So this marvelously aware rationalist climbs right on board her irrational upwardness vehicle and off she goes. It was an up like no other up I have ever known, not once during all the years I have been flying. The air was warm, the breeze was sweet, and the stars were glittering. Up and up we went, out over the corn and the soybean fields, much higher than we had ever flown before. It was just me, Bladud, and the air enjoying ourselves. I watched the stars dancing in the sky and luxuriated in the feel of the wind in my hair. I could tell that Bladud was enjoying himself as much as I was—he was having the time of his darling life. We two had become one with the night and the stars, and it didn't get any more perfect than this.

Then I saw it.

There was something ahead of us in the sky. It was hanging motionlessly in the air several hundred feet away, an enormous black circular object. It was incredibly huge, as wide as three football fields. My first thought was: oh my goodness, a dirigible! But I immediately realized that the thing in the air before me wasn't shaped like an enormous pork sausage. It was perfectly round, and no lights of any kind were flashing on it. There was no way it could be a dirigible, let alone a helicopter or an aircraft. The horrible truth pierced my heart like a sharp knitting needle. It was a flying saucer! What? Just like in the movies? Could that be possible? I tried to steady myself. For the past half century, we Americans have been inundated with preposterous tales about alien invasions, people getting kidnapped, the spaceship crash at Roswell, New Mexico, blah, blah. There must be millions of people in this country who think that our precious federal government keeps covering the information up (a theory which I have never found persuasive, since I've never seen evidence that the federal government is capable of keeping a secret of any kind). The only thing that a rationalist like myself can conclude about the invasion-of-aliens-from-outer-space stuff is that it is pure poppycock, comparable only to the movie they made in the 1970s about the killer tomatoes.

But here, right now before my eyes was . . . what? Bladud stopped dead in his swoopings as if he were as astonished as I. It might have been my imagination, but I seemed to sense a trembling in his Heathcliff shaft. We were just hanging there without moving exactly like the thing before us. Then I saw a light, a kind of purplish glow that seemed to emerge from the center of the circle. The light was a fine line of illumination which slowly increased to the shape of a rectangle. I realized that a window was opening up in the thing before me, and I felt myself go cold with terror. Here was evidence right before my empirically sensitive eyes that not only did flying saucers exist but that they were being piloted by some kind of non-earthly beings! I had expended so much energy and effort over the years worrying about the dirigible nuisance that it had never occurred to me I might collide with something even more dangerous in the air. And here I was, on a perfectly beautiful flying night, having to deal with a flying saucer. I must confess that my fear vanished in a wave of irritation. What in the world were aliens from outer space doing over a one-horse town like Carver? Why hadn't they gone where they were wanted, such as Sedona? But here they were, appearing out of nowhere right in the middle of my friendly skies and ruining my starlight fun. I didn't care if they were aliens from outer space or what. They sure had their nerve.

Then it occurred to me that the reason they had show up over Carver might be—me. Me? Mona Wilcox? I remembered that I was one of the few people in our post-modern world who knew how to fly on a broomstick. Was it possible that these aliens had noticed me on their radar or something? My irritation grew. Why pick on me? If they were so damn curious about a witch on a broomstick, why couldn't they go to California and find themselves a brainless surfer bimbo who would welcome an encounter with aliens from outer space? With a sinking heart I remembered that this was Saturday night. I was probably the only witch in the continent of North America who was flying the skies—all the others would be cooped up indoors, arguing about the next ritual. No wonder these creeps had detected me.

Then I saw them. There were three distinct figures visible in the purple light. They looked exactly like every picture of an outer space alien you've ever seen: bald heads, tilted eyes, short stature, and purplish coloring. With surprise I realized that the coloring was wrong. Purplish? Aliens from outer space were supposed to be greenish. This had always been some kind of a rule: alien-from-outer-space skin color was pale green, which is an interesting color. There was no trace of green anywhere in these revolting creatures. They were purplish. A sort of ghastly vomit-colored purplish, which gave their bald heads the look of diseased neon eggplants. The closer we moved to them, the more anal-retentive they looked. Talk about warped. Just my luck to collide with purplish aliens.

Then I realized that Bladud and I were moving closer to the spaceship. We weren't just hanging motionlessly in the air, we had started to approach the spaceship window. "Bladud, darling," said I in the lowest possible voice, "we've got to scram." I felt the shaft come alive in my hands. With immense relief I felt him drop his nose downward, which is always the first indication that he is about to make a dive. But nothing happened—except that Bladud started shaking. We weren't diving, nor were we backing off. We continued to move towards the spaceship. Bladud started to jerk this way and that, he trembled, he shook, he vibrated—he was struggling with all his might. But still we were being drawn towards the saucer. It came to me that there was some kind of purplish phosphorescence in the air around me, and there was a light beam coming from the ship. We were being sucked into the spaceship! Bladud had no strength to resist! Good grief! It wasn't enough that these bozos had ruined our Saturday night flight—now we were being kidnapped by them! This whole thing was turning into a great big fat bummer.

I tried to steady myself. I decided that I would simply inform these creatures that kidnapping was a federal offense, and that they didn't have any right to transgress Carver's airspace without a green card or something. They would have to go back to where they had come from. This seemed an eminently reasonable course of action, but would purplish aliens be reasonable? By now I was close enough to see their eyes, and I didn't like what I saw. These aliens didn't have rational-looking eyes—some kind of burgundy day-glow color was spilling out of their repellent pupils. My kidnappers were obviously possessed of the kind of brain-dead Piscean fanaticism that you can still find all over the planet. For a moment I was interested to discover that that the stupidity and extremism of us human entities was not a unique phenomenon in the universe, but then I started to get sick. These guys weren't just aliens, they were Piscean aliens! For all I knew they might be schoolteacher aliens! Maybe even post-modern schoolteachers! With a shock of horror I realized that there was nothing more terrible in the wide wide universe than a purplish post-modern Piscean schoolteacher alien!

There still didn't seem to be anything that I could do—no one was about to come to my rescue. And . . . Oh, I can't go on with this tonight. My head is starting to hurt. I need another banana. You'll have to hear more tomorrow.

Mona

* * *

October 20

Janet, sorry it's taken so long for me to get back to you. Yes, I know I left you in considerable suspense at the end of my last e-mail, but isn't it clear that I escaped from those hideous creatures? I mean, here I am, sitting in front of the computer and typing up yet another e-mail. I'm not trapped in some kind of flying saucer thing, arguing about the exigencies of deconstructive syllogisms. I'm right back where I need to be, in my own living room with Ralph snoozing at my feet. There have been several more developments since my last e-mail. Before I explain what happened with the aliens, you're going to have to hear about everything else first.

I must start with Sharon's visit. As you know, my girlfriend Sharon comes to Carver occasionally, and we always go to lunch. She was in town last Thursday, and we went to that Italian restaurant near the tracks, the one with the homemade tomato sauce. And right between the salad and the lasagna I told her the whole story of my adventures with the aliens, every last syllable of it, up to and including the bananas. It was only when I started talking about the necessity of bananas that she finally spoke. "Why do you keep raving about bananas?" she demanded. "What possible relevance do bananas have with this alien stuff?"

"I have to keep eating bananas!" I exclaimed. "What else are you supposed to do after you've been kidnapped by aliens from outer space? You eat bananas until they start coming out of your ears! Normally, I don't even like bananas, but nothing else is helping me get the memory of those ghastly purplish aliens out of my mind!"

"Yeah. Right. Purplish aliens," was her response. She was picking at her salad as if she were disturbed about something. She finally looked up at me with an expression of profound compassion in her eyes. "Mona," said she, "are you even trying to get a date these days?"

"What has that got to do with anything?" I asked, astonished.

"Honey, that happens to be the problem." And with that she tore into me. She went on to say that I had been living too long by myself, that I had always been susceptible to ridiculous daydreams, that I couldn't expect her to believe the nonsense that I was talking, and that I needed to find a new boyfriend before I went bonkers. I could hardly believe my ears. Sharon hadn't believed a single word about my kidnapping! Even worse—she actually didn't believe I could fly on a broomstick! I tried to protest, but she continued to declare it was nothing but some kind of asinine fantasy. Now as you know I happen to be wholeheartedly in favor of creative imagination, but not this kind of imagination. You're supposed to create truth and beauty with your creative abilities, not indulge in sick fantasies.

"Mona, has anyone ever seen you fly?" was her only comment after my protestations. Well, of course not—I had never demonstrated my skills with the broom to anyone, not since that terrible night when I spooked the guy up the street. "So then how do you know it's not a fantasy?" she demanded, sitting there looking as smug as Ralph. All at once I went cold with doubt. Well, it was true that I had never shown anyone my skills on the broom, but that surely didn't mean that . . .

"Come home with me now," I protested. "I'll show you everything. I'll even take you for a spin on the broom if you like." For this I got a look, but she made no further protest.

So back we went to the house. I told myself that I would just demonstrate a small turn around the yard for her and maybe get her to try Bladud herself. It was a quiet afternoon, and no one would notice us. End of problem. Ralph was waiting for me as usual, and—Janet, you are never going to believe what happened next. The moment I opened the door I discovered that Bladud's bristles had been scattered all over the living room floor. The string with which I had so carefully tied them together had been ripped to pieces. And the Heathcliff shaft was lying in the middle of the room with teeth marks upon it. I knew at once what had happened: Ralph had murdered Bladud! "Oh, the wicked dog!" I gasped. "The wicked, wicked dog!"

I could only stand there without moving, so stricken was I with purest horror. How this had happened I could not even begin to imagine. Knowing Ralph's dislike of Bladud, I had always taken precautions to keep the broom out of harm's way every time I left the house. This particular morning I had left Bladud on top of the bookcase, and the top of the bookcase happens to be seven feet off the floor. This should have rendered him unattackable. Ralph is barely two feet high, and there is no dog in the world, not even one as effervescent as Ralph, who can leap five feet up into the air to seize hold of a broomstick. But somehow Ralph had managed to do exactly that. My dearest and most beloved broomstick had been annihilated, and at the precise moment I intended to demonstrate my flying skills to another human being. Sharon didn't seem surprised. She plopped down on the sofa and started repeating what she had said earlier, namely that I had imagined the whole thing. This time she was also pleased to announce that I had English literature on the brain, I had to stop it with my sick Emily Brontë fantasies, and—most importantly—I had to find myself a new boyfriend. Every word she spoke seemed to scald like acid through my brain. I desperately wanted to argue with her and prove her wrong . . . but all at once, in the deepest part of my soul, I realized that she was right. The flying broomstick had been nothing more than a fantasy. All the fun I thought I had been having flying around through the air on a stick . . . well, it had never really happened.

Janet, yes—this is the truth. I must admit it to you now. My flying broomstick has been some kind of ridiculous fantasy. I never managed to get up into the sky on a broom, nor was I kidnapped by outer space aliens. I think I owe you an apology. I mean, here I've been wasting your time this past year, keeping you in suspense, telling you about each and every laborious step I took in order to get up into the air, and now I discover that the air was something I never quite managed. I haven't been flying on anything, let alone a witch's broomstick. I've just been dreaming about it or imagining it or something. Everything you've heard from me from the past year has been totally demented. Flying on a broomstick! I mean, how crazy can anybody get?

And philosophers aren't supposed to be crazy. This was the worst part of it. I had convinced myself that I had finally turned into a rational philosopher who was living in complete Aquarian harmony with the universe. Talk about self-delusions. So much for epistemology, not to mention empiricism, pragmatism, and the convergence theory of truth. If you can't tell the difference between actually flying on a broomstick and imagining you're flying on a broomstick, how can you possibly know anything about anything? Here I was thinking that I had finally succeeded at something in my life, namely leving off the ground, but it had been nothing but an insubstantial dream.

Oh, I can't go on with this. I feel too dismal. Later . . .

Mona

P.S. Since it never really happened, I suppose there's no point in telling you what happened when Bladud and I were finally dragged into that alien spaceship. It's a pretty ghastly tale anyway, and since it was some kind of unreality there's no point in discussing it. I'm back to sanity now. I confess I still check the sky each night for signs of flying saucers, but I haven't seen a trace of one. All I know is that my feet are back on solid ground, where they belong. Simple human reality. I'll have to start getting used to it again.

* * *

November 2

Janet, thanks for being so understanding. And thanks for not saying that your mother has been right about me all these years. It's a relief to hear that there is at least one person on planet earth, namely my favorite niece, who doesn't think I'm a complete wacko. I'm also glad that some of what I've conveyed to you during the past year has been worthwhile. But as for flying on a broomstick . . . I need to forget it, and so do you. No more nonsense about upwardness, please! That stuff is over and done with in my life.

I have not attempted to reconstruct the boom—I have let it go. Letting go is my great psychological cure-all, remember. Especially letting go of the things you get obsessed about, and I can see now that the idiot broom had become an obsession to me. I had sold my soul to it as thoroughly as your average alcoholic surrenders his life to the booze. Obsessions are always imprisonments. They don't free you from anything. I understand now why I was so enthralled by the broom, or at least my fantasy of it—it was a symbol of my eternal desire to release myself from the bondage and constrictions of the earth. But as long as you're a living human being, freeing yourself from the earth isn't something you should want. People aren't meant for air—they are designed for solid ground. They need to walk on it, draw strength from it, and find meaning in it. If you're not a bird, which I am definitely not, getting into the air on a fragile stick is as unhealthy as it gets. Besides now that I think about it, I can't remember feeling any kind of spiritual liberation when I thought I was flying. That was supposed to be the whole point of a flying broomstick, remember, and it didn't happen.

So it's goodbye broom. I have taken Bladud's bristles and thrown them on the compost heap. They will return to the earth from which they were made, which is the blessing that comes to all of us. The Elvis key ring has gone back to my purse, where it will resume its existence hooked up to the house and car keys. From now on if something needs sweeping, I'm going to use a factory-made plastic broom which I can buy at Dollar General. Thanks to Sharon I got the kind of reality check we need now and then. She was right. It had been nothing but a silly fantasy.

But endings always mean new beginnings, and it has occurred to me that in freeing myself from the broom, I have been handed a marvelous opportunity to move into new mental space—spiritual liberating space, that is. This was the whole idea of lev, remember. If anything of value remains after my foolishness, the idea of spiritual freedom has got to be it. I still like the idea of a self-reliant spirituality, free of pumpums, tradition, organizations, and dogma. And I have realized that there are dozens of other things I can start doing to enhance it. You are probably going to be interested in hearing about one of them.

You will recall that one of my insights about the broom was that it was some kind of metaphysical conveyance. In other words, it was a physical vehicle which not only freed medieval witches from the constraints of organized religion, but also got them closer to the Divine. When I was sitting on the porch yesterday evening, I realized that there are many other kinds of devices which can do this job quite efficiently. Then I realized that I already had one! This particular conveyance is a practical kind of something which can be had by anyone, and which doesn't do anything spectacular such as flying through the air. The thing I am talking about has been around for several hundred years and is as popular as peanut butter. You've probably got one at the moment, although I doubt that you have ever realized its spiritual potential. I am, of course, referring to the great American rocking chair.

Janet, forget the broom. Forget about growing broom corn and finding a Heathcliff shaft. You even need to forget Elvis. If you want to acquire an Aquarian physical contrivance which will transport you to new levels of spiritual liberation, what you need is a rocking chair. That's right—get thee to a rocking chair. In this country rocking chairs have been around since colonial times and are pretty ubiquitous to this day. You've sat in them, I've sat in them, practically everyone we know has sat in them. In the 19^th century European visitors to this country were astonished at the number and variety of rockers they found in every corner of the land, and the energetic bobbing back and forth that went along with them. Of course, rocking chairs haven't been much in evidence since the end of the Second World War when America turned corporate, but that's when everything in this country started to go wrong.

So if you want a spiritual vehicle that can connect you to all the intellectual energy bombarding the planet here at the dawn of the Aquarian age, you need to find something that will keep your thoughts moving. And there is nothing which keeps the mind moving like—movement. Walking will do it. Getting into your car and driving somewhere will do it even better. But settling down in grandma's rocking chair and rocking your head away will do it best of all. There is nothing like the movements of an old-fashioned rocking chair to push your mind into new space and freedom. What matters about rocking chairs, of course, is rhythm, and the more you have of it in your life, the better. I have already mentioned the power that music can have over us, but just plain old rhythm can be equally compelling. Our great-grandparents who spent their evenings rocking away on the porch probably knew more than about living in harmony with universal energies than we are willing to credit them. One thing I've realized about my fantasy of flying on the broomstick was that it never seemed to be any kind of rhythmical experience. No, it was just a boisterous bouncing from one spot to another without rhyme or reason. This has got to be the ultimate in spiritual stupidity. If there is no rhythm in your spiritual energy, it's not spiritual, period.

Understanding and feeling rhythm is also the best possible way to attain a genuine sense of tranquility, and if there is one essential key to the good life, it has to be this. Mental tranquility is always yours for the asking whenever you settle down in a good solid rocking chair. What is true tranquility anyway but a kind of natural harmony? A good rocker can engender this harmony like nothing else on earth. Like a loaf of bread or a bottle of wine, a well-made rocker balances the elements of earth, air, fire, and water. It is a perfect mixture of comfort, proportion, and movement. All of which means that a good rocking chair can deliver the best kind of freedom, a rhythmic kind of freedom, where you are able to align yourself to cosmic rhythms. When Walt Whitman says:

Roaming in thought over the Universe, I saw the little that is good steadily hastening towards immortality,
And the vast all that is call'd Evil I saw hastening to merge itself and become lost and dead.[80]

. . . there is no doubt in my mind that he was doing this roaming while comfortably settled in a solid well-crafted rocking chair. You need to remember that the best journey is the kind where you don't go anywhere, except right into the living moment with its richness and meaning. A good rocking chair can do this for you like nothing else on earth. Each sound, each sight, each thought you contemplate while in your rocker can provide you with wondrous spiritual vision. Even better: if you let your rocking chair's slow, steady rhythms penetrate into your very being, you can also start to generate imaginative energy. If you are still wondering if you can experience the kind of relaxed reverie where the imaginal world becomes as real as the ordinary world which surrounds you, you should try it sometime in a rocking chair. You might be surprised at how easy it can be.

There is, of course, no secret about using a rocking chair. You just sit down and do it. However, I have learned that trying to use a rocking chair on that good old Naugahyde carpet is worse than useless. Rockers were made for hardwood floors, preferably of the front porch variety. Also don't think that your grandma's rocker is too old-fashioned or tacky to keep around the house. One thing I've learned is that the older your rocker is, the better. They don't make 'em like they used to. The more rhythmic vibrations your rocker has experienced over the years, the more spiritual it will prove. And make sure you've got a rocker that squeaks, or at least groans. A rocker that makes some kind of rhythmic sound is an exceptional blessing. Ralph always rests contentedly beside me whenever I settle down in my rocker. Bladud he hated, but he thoroughly approves of my ancient old rocker. Rocking my life away is exactly what he wants me to do.

When you do settle back and start to rock, what can appear before your eyes is glorious wonder. Of course, whenever I'm out rocking on the front porch, what I usually notice is never much of anything, perhaps only an occasional pick-up rattling by, or my neighbor's garbage at the end of their driveway, or the high school parking lot down the street. These are sights which do not magnify my mental tranquility, to say the least. However, what matters is that I am passing through the moment in harmony with the universe. And as long as I keep rocking, I am flowing like water or music or clouds. This can happen most frequently when I can rock in one of those richly glorious times in our lives, in a long, lingering twilight, or a golden spring dawn, or a lazy afternoon when the honeysuckle is in bloom and the fragrant air knocks me right out of my skull. When I can rock myself into moments like these, I can turn my whole existence into poetry.

I'm sure you haven't forgotten how I used to wax eloquent about the glorious feel of clouds on my bare feet. I now realize that it was a figment of my imagination, but it was such a delightfully vivid fantasy that I haven't been able to forget it. Fortunately I have discovered that the delectable combination of air, moisture, and feet can still be had as long as you are blessed with a rocker and a porch. All you have to do is wait for a foggy day, go out onto the porch, settle down in your rocking chair, take your shoes off, prop up your feet, and presto! Heaven on earth is yours! Here at the beginning of November it is the perfect time of the year for mists and fogs, those enchanting between times when water merges with air. So as luck would have it, yesterday morning I woke up to a world wreathed in mist. A perfect foot and fog moment! I threw on some clothes and went out to the porch. Not a soul was in sight. I settled down in the rocking chair, took off my shoes, and up went the feet. O bliss! O paradise! Never could have imagined that anything could be more delightful. I mean, whatever it was I thought I was doing on the broom was nothing in comparison. Granted I can't experience the delights of feet and fog all the time, but I am confident that occasional moments like these will continue in my life, and I intend to take advantage of them.

Now that I'm an Aquarian philosopher, I can also see that the regular use of a good rocking chair is one of the best ways to find wisdom. The most congenial time to read a book is when you are rhythmically rocking your ego away. The words that you read while rocking make a much more profound impact upon you than anything you might absorb while propped up on some darn sofa. I still think that some plain old-fashioned learning can do more good for you than all the Buddhist meditation cushions in the world, but it has to be the right kind of learning, the kind that leads to awareness and wisdom. If you take time to ponder the words of the greatest sages while rocking your life away, I guarantee that you will live a successful and contented life. Mind you, you should not become addicted to your dear little rocker the way I was addicted to Bladud, but when you make time for rocking in your life, even Henry James starts to make sense.

But let us remember that a Piscean blowhard like Henry James is not going to be much studied in the Aquarian era to come. And the sooner the Aquarian age gets here, the better. Imagine for a moment what this country might be like without corporate hegemony, Prozac, Big Macs, air-conditioned nightmares, sitcoms, Bernie Madoffs, gargantuan federal debt, trophy houses, golden parachutes, beige carpeting, death games, entertainment centers, plastics, and pharmaceuticals—and how did the American dream reach such a bleak dead end, anyway? What might be coming in the world ahead of us is an opportunity to create the real American dream, either the Jeffersonian dream of independent agrarian citizens, or the Transcendentalist dream of closeness to nature, simple living, and individual freedom. This would be a world where it might be possible to live, as Kerouac says, "the joyous life in America without much money." It would be the authentic American dream, the dream that the Founders truly wanted for us, a genuine new order of the ages. There is no freedom like the freedom we might find if we can rid ourselves of wasteful, greedy corporate America.

I'm sure you haven't forgotten how many times I have mentioned lighting out for the Territory in these emails. Well, the Territory is something I never quite managed, for the obvious reason that it no longer exists—or so I used to think. Guess what. In the Aquarian era to come, the Territory is going to come back. And since it's going to be a territory free from the burdens and the follies of the past, we will all be able to find our way into it. The human race is about to embark upon a new stage of evolution, where we are going to move into a new way of being more easily than any group of human beings in history. Let me give you an example of what I mean. Try to imagine yourself fifty or sixty years down the road, on a pleasant night in June. Where do you see yourself? What do you think you will be doing? Simple. You will be sitting on your front porch with your granddaughter, rocking your life away. And she might say to you: "Grandma, what was it like to hang out in a shopping mall?" To which you will inevitably reply, "Honey, it totally sucked."

But no—a conversation like that will never happen in the Aquarian era. Your granddaughter won't have the slightest curiosity about Piscean shopping malls, nor will she waste her energy contemplating the follies of the true-believing past. What will matter to both of you on that evening in the future will be the magic of the summer twilight, the luminous glow of the evening star, the touch of the breeze on your skin, your copy of Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy, and, of course, your rocking chairs. On evenings like these it will be quite normal for both of you to feel the twilight shift into visionary meaning. I expect that your granddaughter will find this to be quite natural. She won't need Emerson to know that the only sin is bondage to the past. As for her spirituality, she will be smart enough to trust her own inner resources, instead of paying any attention to the ravings of long-dead Piscean pumpums.

In other words, she will be a new type of human being, one whose whole being is full of light. And it will be the right kind of light, the kind of purely natural light that comes from the sun or the moon or the stars. Have you ever given much thought to those beings of light in Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, namely the elves? Tolkien's elves are a powerful, mystical, enlightened race of beings who resemble the Tuatha De Danann, the Irish race of immortals. They also resemble the Buddhist idea of the Bodhissattva, those admirable souls who renounce enlightenment until everyone has achieved it (and the word Bodhisattva happens to be Sanskrit for light-being). Well, Tolkien's light-beings know how to exist in perfect harmony with the universe. They are envisioned as keepers and protectors of the natural world. They possess both an endless curiosity about their environment, as well as an intimate understanding of it. Their senses are so acute that they can see long distances without difficulty, and they walk so lightly upon the earth that they leave no mark. They can communicate from mind to mind without speech, and they understand the importance of divination. Most importantly, the elves are artists. To create is their natural instinct. In these luminous beings you don't find any Nietzschean claptrap about the will to power—all their energies go into creating harmonious beauty from the natural things of this world. We see that they are godlike in their ability to do so: their jewelry, rings, woodwork, and talismans are always sublimely beautiful. The elves are also skilled at music and poetry, both of which they can compose and perform without difficulty. Tolkien understood the importance of rhythm in the universal scheme of things. Lots of people these days dream of living like a hobbit, but as for me, I would rather be an elf.

Now imagine an America where creativity is the only thing that matters, and you do it for the sheer joy of doing it. Even better—you are able to embody your visions with perfect harmony between thought and form. Nobody could ever be discontented in such a society, not when your energies are constantly directed towards the manifestation of beauty. Tolkien's idea of ultimate happiness was always connected to creativity. His race of gods, the Valar, are divine only because they create. Nobody ever got bored in Rivendale or Lothlorien, even without cable TV, because they were always bringing new form into being. Also nobody ever lusted after corporate clout, creature comforts, exotic vacations, or other yuppie abominations. Why bother about one ring to rule them all, when you can spend your days walking in sunlit groves, crafting beauty, gazing at the stars, and singing your songs?

So forget about being a human artist. Turn yourself into an elven one. What's interesting about Tolkien's elven aesthetic is that it is mostly focused upon what can be found in the natural world, especially trees, stars, and light. Add music and song, and it was all your average elf needed in the wide world. I have always pitied those brain-dead nature lovers who think they need expansive vistas or majestic mountains to get a kick out of the scenery. The elves of Middle Earth focused their attention upon what is so common that it can be had by everyone: music, light, trees, and stars. Plenty of these here in Carver, plenty everywhere on earth. If we really are heading into the Territory in the Aquarian age to come, we won't need to jet off to Yosemite once a year. We will have access to all the enchantment that we need right where we are, an enchantment that will always be fresh, delightful, and wondrous.

The stars will do that to you every time. They have been doing it to wise men and women from time immemorial, and they can do it to us today. Don't forget that it is the light of the stars which brought Tolkien's elves into consciousness—many of the elven characters in The Lord of the Rings are described as having the light of the stars in their eyes. Well, you can't have the light of the stars in your eyes if your eyes never look upon the stars. So if you want to experience a genuine Aquarian awakening, start watching the stars. Start watching them this night if possible. Let their radiant light penetrate into your very being, tonight, tomorrow night, as often as you can. I guarantee that you will feel a shift into a different kind of consciousness. One of my metaphysical laws is that people become what they contemplate. If you would like to fill your whole being with starlight, you simply have to open your eyes and start looking.

Remember that a poet is someone who looks, just looks, and what he sees is paradise . . . Tolkien discovered it, as did Shakespeare. As much as I love Tolkien, the more I reread Shakespeare's final plays, the more certain I am that here you can find the bedrock truth about human existence. It is interesting to discover that in Shakespeare's final plays evil no longer seems to exist. Instead we get a sense of fulfillment, where lost things are miraculously restored, harmony is attained, and beauty is triumphant. The characters in the Romances always manage to achieve some kind of self-awareness, which ultimately is the only thing that matters. As Cardinal Wolsey says in Henry the Eighth:

I know myself now; and I feel within me
A peace above all earthly dignities
A still and quiet conscience.[81]

I tend to think that if human life has a goal or a direction, it is towards a more spiritual kind of consciousness, and a greater self-awareness is the key. This seems to be the essence of evolution. It is not necessarily Darwin's idea of the physical development of species, but some kind of psychic evolution into greater and greater awareness, both of the self and of the world. I don't want to think that human existence is a jumbled, meaningless mess going exactly nowhere. I want our lives on this earth to have value and purpose. It is our duty as citizens of the universe not just to exercise our powers of creation but to expand our spiritual sensibilities. As long as you do it with the kind of careful, disciplined, practiced expansion of consciousness that can genuinely transform your life. Heaven will appear on earth not only when we start devoting most of our energies to co-creating the universe along with the Divine, but when our consciousness has expanded to such an extent that we can finally see reality for what it truly is: eternal, interconnected, and holy.

Phew. Janet, I think I'm finally finished spewing forth all my hot air, which is probably as much of a relief to you as it is to me. I was delighted to read in your last email that you've got a job offer at a design company in Indiana. It sounds perfect for you. And you tell me that Greg likes the idea of moving to a small town? No need for bright lights and big city for him, let alone the six figure yuppie salary? And he even likes to read Kerouac? My goodness, imagine finding a dharma bum in this day and age! Has he got an unmarried father?

As for me, next Monday I will write up a new ad in the Women Seeking Men advertisements, and who knows? Perhaps this time I might find somebody interesting. Now that I've finished with broomsticks and cauldrons, maybe I can finally get a date. But at the moment, it's a warm night. It's time for me to go out and look at the stars.

Yours forever,

Mona

FOOTNOTES

1   Shakespeare, Macbeth, IV.i.1557. 

2   Geoffrey of Monmouth, History of the Kings of Britain, p. 28.

3   Bergerac, Voyage to the Moon, p. 16.

4   Rogers, A Cookbook for Poor Poets and Others, p. 1, 61.

5   Kerouac, The Dharma Bums, p. 127.

6   King James Bible, Book of Revelation, xxi:16.

7   Quoted in Koestler, Darkness at Noon, p. 95.

8   Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary.

9   Emerson, Essays - First Series, II. Self Reliance.

10   Acton, Historical Essays & Studies, p. 504.

11   Twain, Roughing It, Chapter 16.

12   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godhra_train_burning

13  Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, p. 286.

14  Voltaire, "Epistle to the Author of the Three Imposters", http://oldpoetry.com/opoem/29767-Voltaire-Epistle--to-the-author-of--The-Three-Impostors-

15  Paine, Age of Reason, Chapter 3.

16  King James Bible, Mark 10:11-12.

17  King James Bible, Matthew 19:21.

18  Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound.

19  Wigginton, Foxfire 3, p. 437-450.

20  Giles, Taoist Teachings, Book II.

21  Watts, This Is It, p. 77.

22  Watts, In My Own Way, p. 55.

23  Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being, p. 23-24.

24  Kelly, Crafting the Art of Magic, and Randolph, Ozark Superstitions.

25  Crowley, Moonchild, p. 193.

26  Adler, Drawing Down the Moon, p. 70.

27  Hubbard, Selected Writings, p. 342.

28  Shakespeare, As You Like It, II.v.873.

29  Robertson, The End of the Age, p. 41, 67.

30  Starhawk, The Spiral Dance, p. 13.

31  De Finod, A Thousand Flashes of French Wit, Wisdom, and Wickedness, p. 114.

32  Emerson, Nature, Chapter 1.

33  Pindar, "Pythian Ode VIII", quoted in Mascaró, The Bhagavad Gita, p. 31.

34  Proust, Swann's Way, Overture.

35  Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being, p. 72.

36  Lila, The Reckless Mind, p. 198.

37  Saunders et al., In Search of the Ultimate High.

38  Baudelaire, Les Paradis Artificiels, V.  Morale.

39  Thoreau, Journal, vol. 12, May 6, 1854, p. 237.

40  Gide, Le Traité du Narcisse, p. 21.

41  Colvin, John Keats, Chapter 3.

42  Giles, The Civilization of China, Chapter 6.

43  Pater, The Renaissance, p. 237.

44  Joyce, Ulysses, III.

45  Plotinus, The Enneads, Fifth, Section 4.

46  Emerson, Nature, Chapter 8.

47  Li Bai, "Alone Looking at the Mountain", http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Li_Bai

48  Dickinson, Poems, "XXVII Indian Summer".

49  Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, I.v.31.

50  Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, V.ii.3772. 

51  Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, II.vii.41-4.

52  Brontë Sisters, Poems, "Stanzas".

53  Maupassant, Une Vie, Chapter 3.

54  Thoreau, Walden, Baker Farm.

55  Dickinson, "1472", http://plagiarist.com/poetry/8833/

56  Tolkien, The Silmarillon, p. 19.

57  Bachelard, Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Material Imagination.

58  Wordsworth, Complete Poetical Works, "Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey".

59  Mercer, Nature Mysticism, Chapter 28.

60  Longinus, On the Sublime, Chapter 7.

61  Blake, Milton, 32.

62  Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

63  Petrarch, Francis. "The Ascent of Mount Ventoux", at http://history.hanover.edu/texts/petrarch/pet17.html

64  Ellis, The Druids, p. 239.

65  Yeats, The Celtic Twilight.

66  Voltaire, A Philosophical Dictionary, p. 138.

67  James, Pragmatism, Lecture VI.

68  Dante Alighieri, Paradise, Canto II, 128-141.

69  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Way_of_the_Celestial_Master

70  Gibson, The Passion of the Christ.

71  La Rochefoucauld, Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims, 4.

72  Ginsberg, Allen. Sunflower Sutra, at http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=179382

73  Shakespeare, The Winter's Tale, III.iii.77.

74  Coleridge, Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T. Coleridge, September 1, 1832.

75  Wolin, Heidegger's Children, p. 32.

76  Monk, Bertrand Russell, p. 298.

77  Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 7.

78  FitzGerald, The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, XL.

79  Quoted in Emerson, Representative Men, IV. Montaigne; or, The Skeptic.

80  Whitman, Leaves of Grass, "Roaming in Thought".

81  Shakespeare, Henry VIII, III.ii.379.

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Pascal, Blaise. Pensées, translated by W.F. Trotter in 1908, originally published 1670, at Project Gutenberg http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/18269 

Pater, Walter. The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, 1877, at Project Gutenberg http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/4060 

Plato.     The Symposium, translated by Benjamin Jowett in 1897, at Project Gutenberg http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/1600

Plotinus. The Enneads, translated by Stephen MacKenna and B. S. Page in 1916, at the Internet Classics Archive http://classics.mit.edu/Plotinus/enneads.html 

Proust, Marcel.     Swann’s Way, originally published 1914, translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff in 1922, at the University of Adelaide http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/p/proust/marcel/p96s/index.html

Randolph, Vance. Ozark Superstitions. New York: Columbia University Press, 1947.

Reid, Vera W. Towards Aquarius. New York: Arc Books, 1971.

Riefenstahl, Leni (director), and Leni Riefenstahl and Walter Ruttmann (screenwriters).  Triumph of the Will [Motion Picture].  Germany:  Leni Riefenstahl-Produktion, 1935.

Robertson, Pat. The End of the Age: A Novel. Dallas, Texas: Word Publishing, 1995.

Robinson, James Harvey, editor and translator.  Petrarch: The First Modern Scholar and Man of Letters, 1898, selections at  Hanover Historical Texts Project  http://history.hanover.edu/texts/petrarch/pettable.html

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INDEX

Acton, Lord, 36.
Adler, Margot, 87.
Aeschylus, 64.
Allah, 56.
Althusser, Louis, 225.
Apollo, 12, 53, 57, 237.
Aristotle, 13, 160, 220, 236, 237.
Artemis, 57.
Atheists, 25, 28.
Avila, St. Teresa of, 74, 122.

Bach, Edward, 143.
Bachelard, Gaston, 165.
Balzac, Honoré de, 105.
Baudelaire, Charles, 127.
Beat Generation, 209.
Beatrice, 33.
Beauvoir, Simone de, 226-227.
Beethoven, Ludwig von, 41, 75, 76, 132.
Bergerac, Cyrano de, 13, 163.
Bhagavad-Gita, 62, 109.
Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, 38.
Bible, 36 55, 56, 58, 62, 63.
Bierce, Ambrose, 32.
Blake, William, 144, 173, 184.
Blavatsky, Helena, 37-38, 82.
Boethius, 221, 258.
Böhme, Jacob, 144.
Book of Mormon, 36, 62, 79.
Brahms, Johannes, 42.
Broch, Hermann, 161.
Brontë, Emily, 18, 21, 41, 72, 116, 140, 143, 178, 211, 251.
Browning, Robert, 143.
Buber, Martin, 113-114.
Buddha, 28, 75, 76, 149.
Buddhism, 25, 26, 28, 56, 71-76, 88, 99, 106, 116, 136, 202, 228, 257, 259.
Burbank, Luther, 48.

Callenbach, Ernest, 19.
Cameron, Julia, 191.
Carver, George Washington, 48.
Castro, Fidel, 125.
Catholics, 25, 35, 39, 40, 63, 84, 92, 94, 95, 98, 103, 112, 140, 205.
Cavafy, Constantine, 20.
Cayce, Edgar, 188.
Chomsky, Noam, 209.
Christian Science, 32, 37.
Christianity, 17, 26, 35, 37, 39, 55, 62, 77, 86, 88, 94, 108, 202, 206, 218.
CIA, 210.
Cicero, 221.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 214.
Crowley, Aleister, 82, 108.

da Vinci, Leonardo, 13.
Dante Alighieri, 33, 81, 90, 198.
Daoism, 70, 73, 81, 141, 142, 163, 164, 165, 167, 201, 205, 220.
David, Elizabeth, 19, 143, 229.
Deism, 54, 55, 61.
Descartes, René, 220.
Devil, 16, 32.
Dickinson, Emily, 153, 157.
Dietrich, Marlene, 197.
Digby, Kenelme, 143.
Durrell, Lawrence, 161.
Dylan, Bob, 240.

Eastern Orthodox Church, 35, 94.
Easy Rider, 178, 182.
Eddy, Mary Baker, 37, 82.
Eliot, T.S., 161.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 34, 70, 71, 118-120, 134, 144, 169, 172, 193, 217, 230, 258.
End of the Age, The, 105-106, 109.
Epictetus, 73, 220.
Epicureanism, 202.
Epicurus, 220.

Faust, 135, 136, 179, 210, 227.
Fifth Sacred Thing, The, 101-106, 109.
Fonda, Peter, 178.
Foucault, Michel, 225.
Fox, George, 137.
Franklin, Benjamin, 55.

Gardner, Gerald, 78-79, 82-89, 92-93, 95, 97.
Geoffrey of Monmouth, 12.
George III, 55.
Gide, André, 130.
God, 36, 54-56, 58-62, 64, 87, 114, 120, 124, 171.
Goddess, 85-91, 95-96, 98, 204, 221.
Golden Dawn, 79-82, 92.

Harding, Warren G., 121.
Hare Krishnas, 38.
Heaven, 13, 26, 27, 63-64, 89-90, 95, 115, 136, 155, 156, 164, 172, 210, 256, 261.
Hecate, 57.
Heidegger, Martin, 113, 225.
Hell, 26, 27, 75, 89, 90, 156.
Heraclitus, 184.
Himmler, Heinrich, 110-111, 194, 231, 235.
Hinduism, 25, 26, 40, 90, 149, 201, 202.
Hitchcock, Alfred, 161, 204.
Hitler, Adolph, 78, 83, 108, 225, 107.
Hoffer, Eric, 112.
Homer, 152, 181, 190.
Hoover, J. Edgar, 197.
Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 143, 153.
Huang Po, 221.
Hubbard, Elbert, 96.
Hubbard, L. Ron, 38, 39, 82, 105.
Hume, David, 220.
Hussein, Saddam, 105.

I Ching, 173.
Ichazo, Oscar, 28.
Inquisition, 112, 239.
Islam, 25, 28, 63, 90, 201, 206, 215, 216, 218.

Jefferson, Thomas, 55, 257.
Jeffries, Richard, 143.
Jesus Christ, 27 28, 59-61, 63, 94, 200, 202.
John, Augustus, 130.
John the Divine, St., 27-28.
Jones, Jim, 38.
Joyce, James, 137, 161.

Kant, Immanuel, 220, 230.
Keats, John, 114, 131, 135, 233.
Kerouac, Jack, 19, 20, 181, 209, 257, 261.
Khayyám, Omar, 233.
Koran, 62, 63.
Krishna, 56.
Krishnamurti, 32.
Kundalini, 121.

Leek, Sybil, 86.
Lennon, John, 240.
Li Bai, 152.
Lie Zi, 70.
Lilla, Mark, 125.
Lindsay, Vachel, 181.
Longinus, 170, 172.

Machen, Arthur, 143.
Madoff, Bernard, 257.
Maharaj Ji, 38.
Manicheanism, 1, 9107, 108, 112, 181, 210.
Manson, Charles, 168.
Mao Zedong, 226.
Marcus Aurelius, 221.
Marx, Karl, 224-225.
Marxism, 36, 103, 126, 207, 225, 226, 239.
Mary I (Bloody Mary), 39.
Mary Magdalene, 60.
Mary, Virgin, 88.
Maslow, Abraham, 76, 123.
Matriarchy, 89, 93, 102, 104, 108.
Maupassant, Guy de, 156.
Mercouri, Melina, 134.
Michelangelo, 75-76, 236.
Middle Ages, 16, 60, 102, 239.
Minerva, 57, 65, 237.
Mohammed, 28, 62, 200.
Monet, Claude, 112.
Montaigne, Michel de, 220, 235.
Moroni, Angel, 36.
Murray, Margaret, 78, 83.

Nazism, 107, 108, 225.
Neo-Paganism, 86, 97, 108, 117, 168.
Never on Sunday, 134.
New Age, 39, 105, 192.
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 88, 175, 224, 259.
Nirvana, 26, 28, 74, 81.

Occult, 79, 80, 81, 116, 119, 196, 202, 210, 236.
Orwell, George, 112, 215.

Paine, Thomas, 61, 220.
Pater, Walter, 133-134.
Patriarchy, 90, 99, 104, 108, 225.
Paul, St., 59.
Pessoa, Fernando, 20.
Petrarch, Francesco, 186.
Piaf, Edith, 210.
Picasso, Pablo, 130.
Pindar, 120.
Plato, 81, 200, 201, 220, 223, 229, 237.
Plotinus, 137, 200.
Poe, Edgar Allan, 161.
Presley, Elvis, 238-240, 242.
Prometheus, 51, 64, 72, 155, 198, 240.
Protestants, 25, 34, 60, 63, 88, 92, 94, 95, 98, 103.
Proust, Marcel, 121.
Psycho, 204.
Pynchon, Thomas, 210.

Quakers, 216, 231.

Raine, Kathleen, 143.
Rama, Swami, 38.
Raphael, 236.
Renaissance, 60, 204, 217.
Renoir, Pierre-Auguste, 132.
Robertson, Pat, 105-109, 112, 194.
Rogers, Ann, 19-20.
Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 168.
Russell, Bertrand, 228.

Sade, Marquis de, 102.
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 113, 226, 227.
Saturn, 58.
Shakers, 65.
Shakespeare, William, 10, 36, 41, 105, 136, 142, 153-155, 161, 185, 210, 214, 260.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 137, 155.
Smart, Christopher, 143.
Smith, Joseph, 36, 37, 39, 62, 82.
Smith, Pamela Colman, 80.
Smith, Susan, 203.
Socrates, 208, 224.
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, 112.
Spiritual materialism, 99, 122, 127, 192.
Stalin, Joseph, 125, 228.
Starhawk, 87, 88, 91, 93, 95, 101, 106-109, 112, 194.
Stoics, 18, 73, 202, 205.
Sufis, 140, 149.

Taliesin, 192.
Tennyson, Alfred, 143.
Thales, 163, 167.
Theosophy, 32, 37, 38, 78.
Third Reich, 83, 112, 226.
Thomas, Dylan, 132.
Thoreau, Henry David, 20, 127, 140, 157.
Tolkien, J.R.R., 161, 164, 259, 260.
Tolstoy, Leo, 105.
Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de, 42.
Townsend-Warner, Sylvia, 84.
Twain, Mark, 36.

Underhill, Evelyn, 80, 122.
Uranus, 58.

Valiente, Doreen, 85.
van Gogh, Vincent, 41, 114, 131, 149, 236.
Virgil, 33, 161.
Voltaire, 56, 111, 135, 194.
von Nieheim, Dietrich, 29.

Walton, Isaak, 143.
Wang Wei, 131.
Waters, Alice, 229.
Watts, Alan, 70, 74, 75.
Whitman, Walt, 161, 181, 255.
Witchcraft, 9, 10, 44, 65, 70, 77, 78, 82, 85-87, 123, 221.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 228.
Wordsworth, William, 121, 168, 186.

Yahweh, 57-58.
Yeats, William Butler, 80, 161.
Yoga, 201, 220.

Zen Buddhism, 17, 69-75, 77, 98, 99, 116, 122, 125, 127, 149, 153, 179, 180, 192, 196, 202, 210, 220, 221, 232, 234, 236, 239.
Zeus, 56-58, 64, 72, 94.