The Circle of Life and Death

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As we assemble our own unique belief system, we often look with special curiosity to those moments about which we have no data - before birth and after death.  At the end of The God Chord I assert that the fully composed chord is analogous to what traditional faiths name the soul.  I further posit that after death the sentient chord then takes its conscious place with The God Chord as an integral partner in the transcendent harmony that is the uni- or multiverse.

Thinking about that notion kept me up most of the night last night.  I am still fairly content with that notion of transcendence "here at the end of life as we know it."  But somehow it fails to address some fairly pity issues.  Like why "my life," why here, now, why in these particular circumstances?  I have some fairly New Age friends [and no, I don't claim that mantel myself] who assert that we pick our parents.  That smacks too much of the universal intervening directly in the lives of the unique and particular.

Here's where I am right now - and I do have to start at the end of our lives on Earth.  I'm still not pulling completely away from the the evolved sentient chord taking a conscious place in the transcendent harmony of the universe, but I am stopped from fully embracing that concept because of the infinite variety of ways in which we leave this world.  I shiver a bit every time I hear the radio blurb, "A marine from Camp Lejeune was killed in Afghanistan today, 24-year old .  .  . "  or "A truck carrying 12 passengers careened off the road in Dare county killing eight .  .  .  .  ."  I spent time as a lap parent at the local hospital just holding tiny, tiny premies.  Not all of them made it.

The point is this - too many lives end too quickly for them to have composed a chord that has the maturity ready for partnership in the transcendent harmony of the universe.  So where does that chord go?  Does it, as my New Age friends assert, circle the earth scoping out a harmonic womb?  That model does not really fit with FHEBOH, or the essential tuning of the chord.  Again the universal intruding on the particular.  The youthful, or older but still undeveloped chord, must continue to evolve, and neither the sad and inconvenient reality of a premature death, nor the passing of a aged but arrested chord, must be allowed to stop the compositional process. 

Again as asserted in The God Chord our chord is encoded at the level of strings within our DNA, and is relatively unimpeded by the death of the body.  It moves smoothly out into the other 6 or 7 dimensions predicted by the math of string theory and supersymmetry, out into the particle dynamics that define the universe.  So where does it go from there?  Well, remember that the first mandate of FHEBOH is Foster Harmony.  And harmony results from strings being attracted to harmonic strings, that then are attracted to further harmony that eventually coalesce to ever greater harmonic units.  And those units would eventually be drawn to clusters of harmony that hold the greatest attraction for the growing harmonic entity.  Hence, the prematurely truncated or arrested chord is drawn to that next form of existence that contains a promising path to transcendent harmony, to the completion of the chord.  They are born into an existence that provides a positive pathway to transcendent harmony.

I have mentioned "the arrested chord" a couple of times above.  An arrested chord is one that has abdicated the nature of the harmony it pursues.  The keepers of such chords are "harmonic fundamentalists."  They have allowed religious or political dogma to determine the "correct chord."  They no longer seek their unique chord, rather they seek to bend their chord to echo that demanded by their political or religious leaders who, sadly more often than not, are driven by personal desire for money and power.  An arrested chord is a deep spiritual sickness, as it guarantees a partnership with discord.  It is to correct that discord that the arrested chord finds a place alongside the truncated chord in between "compositional sessions" in subsequent existences.

Traditional notions of reincarnation bring us back to Earth to "get it right."  There is a discordant, almost punitive aspect to that.  In seems counter-intuitive from a Foster Harmony perspective.  If Earth had been the right place for this chord, wouldn't have things worked out better the first time around? 

Well, wherever we end up in the next "world into which we are born" our choices in that reality are the compositional acts that further the tuning of our chord.  The tasks remain the same in every existence.  Foster Harmony, Enable Beauty, Oppose Harm.

Okay, so I was about to drop off to sleep - maybe 3 AM.  And then I thought, certainly everyone born here on Planet Earth does not encounter an equal path to success.  Even in this age of digital egalitarianism a staggering number of entrepreneurs trace their roots back to elite schools on the right and left coasts and to deep-pocket investors with ties to those institutions.  India's technological elite can see cesspools of abject poverty from their crystal towers.  China's economic elite are still joined at the hip to the political bosses.  The playing field on Planet Earth seems far from level. Then is struck me: To assume an "advantaged" birth is to wrongly assume that the end state so advantaged lies on the path to transcendent harmony.  Money and power have little relationship to harmony.  We need only scan the headlines from the last few years to see that those who glittered most brightly on the world's financial scene were - how does one put this delicately, glazed turds.

Perhaps to be born with a silver spoon in one's mouth is more a curse than a blessing, as one is taught early by those one loves, that money can buy anything, that power is the objective. If one is fortunate enough to be able to unlearn that fallacy, one cannot help but bemoan the compositional time one wasted shedding that discord.  That is not to say that money and power cannot be used to foster harmony.  The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation seems to be making great headway in that direction.  In the final analysis though, neither wealth nor poverty give one a step up towards harmony.  The divine right of kings and the noble savage are both fallacies. You craft your chord in an existence in which transcendent harmony is possible.  The choices are yours.

Okay, 4:30 and getting a bit drowsy.  Which is when it struck me that the manifestation of your chord must not constrain the legitimate manifestation of another's.  But I'm going to save that for another time.

Foster Harmony. Enable Beauty, Oppose Harm.

Ages of Enlightenment

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I believe it is an old German proverb: We grow too soon old, and too late smart.  There is, no doubt, some wisdom there.  We often shudder at the memory of the follies and arrogance of our youth.  And yet it strikes me that there should be no hard and fast age requirement for enlightenment.  Consider that the space of a life is infinitely varied, from a few feeble moments to those who find their way into triple digits.  Can we reasonably assert that we have to live x number of years before we can sense and begin to tune our unique harmonic relationship to the universe?  Are wisdom and enlightenment the sole prerogative of age?  And before you answer in the affirmative, remember that it wasn't all that long ago when the "elders of the tribe" were those who had seen 30 or 40 seasons

It seems far more reasonable to assert that our lives are riddled with wormholes of wisdom.  The wormholes of theoretical physics improbably provide direct connections between widely separated points in spacetime. Through a wormhole, thousands of lightyears of distance vanish into the space of a single step. Wormholes bend spacetime as we fold a map and, by doing so, place New York and Tokyo slap up against each other.  Wormholes of wisdom are moments of essential harmony, moments of spontaneous unity with our fully developed chord that pop into our lives regardless of our age or awareness.  They allow our chord to unfold before us in all its perfection. The trick is recognizing it for what it is.

That recognition is, I believe, clearer in hindsight.  The longer we live the more often we stumble upon our own particular wormholes of wisdom.  Hopefully, we get better at recognizing them.  As I make my way through my seventh decade, the second of my conscious pursuit of my chord, I meet instances of harmony at every turn.  This morning's sunlight, yesterday's storm, the laughter of friends and family, a Mozart harpsichord piece plinking away in the background - I'm awash in harmony.  All one needs is focus, attention and appreciation.  However, prior to my intentional search for harmony, my chord often had to attract my attention with a smart smack about the head and shoulders: "Hey you! Deaf guy! Pay attention! This is your harmony speaking! Get with the program."

The God Chord opens with a series of vignettes that I attribute to a variety of people.  In reality they are all my own experiences. They were all moments that I now recognize as wormholes of wisdom - moments when my chord forced its way into my unprepared consciousness.  Recently I have made a conscious effort to push back before writing The God Chord to recall more of those moments, moments of harmonic purity that slipped by unnoticed.  A few have surfaced:

A night, perhaps a composite of several, when I count my life in single digits.  I sit out on our screened-in porch.  I am reading a novel about a dog, perhaps Lad, A Dog, by Albert Payson Terhune. Through the open door I  hear my mother noodling about at the piano in the living room.  Rain patters on the roof.  The rare car eases by on wet and whispering tires. A root beer float sweats companionably by my elbow.

Another night, again perhaps a composite.  I lie on the floor of my daughter's room, waiting for her breathing to fade into sleep.  The muted light from the hallway illuminates a mobile - above the crib?  Maybe at the center of the ceiling?  The indistinct objects that anchor the cross-pieces circle lazily in a breeze from somewhere.  No other job intrudes upon this treasured task - easing my child into slumber.

I now weave the reconstruction of these harmonic moments into my evening meditations. I find they ease the transition from the sharper moments of the day into Alternia's quieter shadows.  Give it a try, reach back to those moments when unacknowledged harmony came calling.  It can be quite lovely.
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Of Gentlemen and Thugs

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A friend and I recently exchanged emails bemoaning the seeming pervasive crassness of contemporary culture.  We both felt alienated from a society in which it apparently is “OK” to ignore the pain your behavior and decisions inflict upon others.  Our particular exchange was prompted by the recent vote on gay marriage here in North Carolina where a majority of, I assume, straight voters decided that it was OK to prevent their gay friends and neighbors from getting married.

I wrote about my disappointment in the vote not long ago, and won’t rehash the issue here.  But it was only one in a depressing stream of “acceptable uncivil incidents” that clutter our social landscape.  From our driving, to our politics, to business meetings, to those who sell us our morning coffee, afternoon groceries, or evening repast, to our online interactions, we seem to be morphing into the land of the ruthless rude.

So maybe my nerves were on edge when I stumbled upon something called King of The Rock, on CBS the other night.  The premise was simple – the finals of a one-on-one “streetball” aka basketball tournament played on the exercise yard of Alcatraz.  It was played at night, with harsh lighting appropriate for a defunct maximum-security prison.  That same lighting made it hard to tell, but I think all but one of the finalists were African-Americans.  Before the final match a rapper did a rap stressing that murderers had “stalked this very yard.” Then there was a great deal of glaring and generally thuggish posturing mixed with stunningly mediocre basketball which culminated in some guy who went by the name “Baby Shaq” beating some man of simpler sobriquet who occasionally had the good grace to appear embarrassed to be there.  Maybe he threw the game, ‘cause Baby Shaq had told the audience “I really need the money.”

I was offended by the whole thing, and I’m a 63-year-old white guy.  I hope that enough African-American parents were incensed enough that the sponsor, Red Bull, sees a boycott.  Given, however, that this was the third year of King of The Rock, I doubt that will be happening.  Still, racial squeamishness aside, it was another in the string of public celebrations of thuggish and rude behavior erupting across the nation and beyond.  “We really ought to be embarrassed,” I thought. “Please tell me that somewhere out there the parents of the players, performers, producers and sponsors of this fiasco are sunk in despair, shaking their heads and muttering, ‘I taught you better than that!’”  

And that is when it struck me.  Maybe nobody “teaches better than that” anymore.  I mean “ruthless rudeness” can’t be just the spinoff from increasingly clueless media.  Maybe thugs and slackers are the natural Darwinian offspring of hippies and yuppies.  I mean there have to be some strong genes for rudeness and ruthlessness in that pool, right?!  I started to hyperventilate, so I took myself out for a walk.

Deep calming breath.  Nice clouds.  One, no, two hawks hanging motionless above the trees.

You see there was a time when, even in ruthless, highly competitive sports, there was at least the idea of a gentleman.  In 1892, “Gentleman Jim” Corbett knocked out John L. Sullivan in the 21st round to claim the World Heavyweight Title.  Gentleman Joe Palooka played a similar role in the nation’s newspaper funny pages throughout the 1930s and 40s.  For decades the cry before the Indianapolis 500 was “Gentlemen, start your engines!”

“Whither,” I mused pensively, “today’s ‘gentleman’?”

That naturally took me to Ngram.  What’s an Ngram, you ask?  Excellent question.  One of which I have to remind myself every few months.  Ngam, at http://books.google.com/ngrams, is one of Google’s lesser known, but very cool, products.  It is, as you can tell from the URL part of Google’s “books” project; their typically understated attempt to scan every book in the entire world.  The Ngram piece lets you enter a word or series of words into a text field and when you hit return, you get a graph that shows you the extent to which that word was used in books from 1800 until 2000. Fascinating, try it.  No, no, not now.  Let me finish, please, gentle reader.

OK, so I go to Ngram and enter the word “gentleman.”  The result starts with the “gentleman” of the 1800s high atop the left hand side of the graph.  From there he performs an Olympic downhill slalom run sliding into near obscurity by the year 2000.  I try his counterparts from the fairer sex; gentlewoman and Lady.  They too sweep majestically downhill.

I think you see where I’m going here.  I wonder if, when the words associated with a pattern of behavior decline in a culture, does that mean that the behavior itself also declines?  It seems logical.  If a thing, a referent, remains important in the world then the number of words that identify or make reference to that thing should remain constant.  OK, I realize there are issues here, since Ngram only uses the data from the books that Google scanned.  But such a consistent pattern of usage decline in words associated with a specific type of behavior – etiquette, manners and polite, show only slightly less precipitous Ngram drops – has to mean something; especially since I want it to.  I next entered “crass” and “greed” into Ngram, and the trend reversed. 1800 was the valley and 2000 was the top of the mountain.  Another confirmation of my bias: Our world is sliding into “thugishness,” in language and behavior.  [“Thug” itself, after a seemingly aberrant flurry of popularity in 1820, follows the pattern of crass and greed. “Thugish” and “Thugishness” apparently appear only in this essay.]

While it may be a faint cry in the wilderness, I would like to advocate a return to the use of the word “gentleman.”  Not in the paternalistic sense that may have swelled its usage in the Age of Jane Austin. Rather I propose its use in simpler sense, in a sense that recognizes that “gentleman” is a compound word that refers to an individual who is both male and gentle.  Perhaps, if we breathe new life into the word, the behavior will follow.

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Gone to See the Elephant

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Walking a donkey into the room won’t raise nearly as many eyebrows as an elephant. And that may be why Presidential wannabe, Rick Santorum, trotted his uniquely pious pachyderm out into the center of the Republican primaries.  With his usual mild and self-deprecating style he opined that John Kennedy’s 1960 assertion that church and state should be separate made him “want to vomit.” I would be less concerned were Mr. Santorum merely running for the office of “First Hurler,” but no, he seeks the presidency of the United States. He wants to follow in the footsteps of other “deciders.” Now, one would be a fool to assert that religion played no role in American politics.  It always has, and always will.  But it was usually an elephant kept behind the curtain in a vain hope, I suppose, that we might avoid further shredding whatever tatters remain of civil discourse in American political campaigning.  But St. Rick seems bent on washing the clerical undergarments in public. 

That is truly a shame, because nothing good will come of it.  Here in the Carolinas Franklin Graham – who sadly possesses little of his father’s oratorical skills and seemingly none of his compassion – openly wonders about the sincerity of President Obama’s Christianity.  “The President [pause, pause] says he is a Christian,” Graham muses, and anyone who has spent any time in the Old North State hears in that subtle pause the great Southern qualifier “Bless His Heart!”  

The Founding Fathers were, for the most part, men whose feelings about the place of religion in politics had been formed by living in countries or colonies where one stripe of belief or another was routinely privileged over others.  They had experienced theocracy first hand, lived where your manner of prayer could be fined, land you in the stocks, or even get you killed. It is hardly surprising that they wove into the documents of our young nation the notion that religion should stand apart from government.  Those who tell we have “always been a Christian nation under one god” are either ignorant, lying, or both.  The blood spilt to create this nation gave us the freedom to worship god as we chose, or not to worship were we so inclined.  Theocracy demands religious fealty of all citizen to one faith, one god, one right, and usually lots of wrongs.

We must never lose sight of the fact that the history of theocracies is writ in varying shades of blood.  Ancient examples span the globe, from the Mayans to the Conquistadors to the Crusades to the Inquisition.  And the beat goes on.  Catholics kill Protestants, who return the favor. Sunnis kill Shiite, while the Sufis spin madly around trying to keep an eye on the Druze. Hindis and Muslims rattle the nuclear saber over Kashmir.  Generic "Christians" kill generic "Muslims" who attack generic "Infidels."  And everyone seems to attack the Jews.  Humans are killed because books are inadvertently burned. Tibetan monks burn themselves alive to confront religious oppression.  Muslim women and children blow themselves up to fast track themselves to paradise.  And now Santorum wants the nomination because he is "more Christian" than all the other candidates?  Have we all really checked our brains at the door?

Our government utilizes a system of checks and balances.  Congress, the legislative branch, checks on the Judicial Branch.  The Justices keep an eye on the President, who appoints the Supreme Court and must sign off on the laws passed by Congress.  Nobody has all the toys.  The idea is if we can’t have all the toys, perhaps we will be willing to share.  OK, that’s not going so well right now, but that is the idea.

These partitioned forms of government grow out of the seemingly cynical but ultimately truthful notion that power corrupts and that absolute power corrupts absolutely. So poles of power must be kept at least partially isolated.  Most human cultures seem to consistently evolve four pillars upon which society rests: Marketplace, Military, Religion and Government.  The reality of power in human society plays out through a shifting set of alliances that form, dissolve and form again as each pillar seeks its own advantage.  We have no historic record of a culture in which one of the pillars subsumed the roles of the other and ruled successfully.  It is true that dictators, strong men, and god kings have seized all four pillars for brief heady bursts of absolute power.  But the Greeks seemed to have gotten that part right – those who rise to the heights of the gods, will be cast down with a viciousness that mirrors their meteoric rise.  It seems that in addition to absolute corruption, absolute power holds the seed of its own disaster.

Some of my evangelical friends seem compelled to ask if I have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.  I must reply, “No, but I am quite close to his father.”  My point, all kidding aside, is that religion is an intensely personal aspect of an individual’s life.  One should not wrap it around you like a new outfit – “Oh, how nice! Don’t you look godly?” “What a pious petticoat!”  My spirituality is intensely important to me, and it is utterly private.  I prefer not to pray, or be prayed for, in public, prayer should be a private conversation, not a doctrinal pep rally. 

To pick a president, or any other elected official, on the basis of the public fervor of their religious conviction is sheer insanity.  Choosing our elected officials is our most important public task and should be split apart completely from the private issues of faith and belief.  The road to an American theocracy is paved with religious litmus paper tests of the kind implied by Santorum and Graham. I encourage you to think long and hard before you set your feet on that icy, narrow path.  Not only does theocracy lead us down the slippery slope to jihad and crusade, to Inquisition and its secular twin, the Reign of Terror, but it also leads us to an inevitable coalition among Faith, Government, Marketplace and the Military.  And that, my friend, is an unholy alliance that dies bitterly and hard, sweeping the streets with the blood of the innocents.

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