Correspondence

I want to thank you for THE SUN. I have had occasion to see just a few issues, and the most recent one (the Patricia Sun issue) was so rich for me that I wanted to share my gratitude. I’ve already written letters to two contributors who moved me. THE SUN is so personal, so real, that I connect to it right away. It’s not a bunch of articles telling how to or about living life more consciously. It’s real experiences of living that way, and as such it just comes alive.

Even a movie review becomes something different in THE SUN — John Rosenthal’s article on “Apocalypse Now” was so real, so deeply felt and honestly argued, that I felt like I met him too, and I thank him. I didn’t even see the movie — mainly because I imagined it would be all the things he so cogently describes it as being, although I couldn’t have conceptualized or verbalized the issue so clearly.

As you see, I’m a member of a spiritual community, and have been, until recently, editor of our quarterly newspaper, Yoga Quest, and of our Health Center newsletter insert. So I related very much to your opening editorial, specifically the part about “our ration of eternity . . . awaits us not in Heaven. It’s here now.” I wondered if you had read C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce which I just read. He has a wonderful phrase about that:

All his earthly past will have been Heaven to those who are saved . . . the good man’s past begins to change so that his forgiven sins and remembered sorrows take on the quality of Heaven . . . at the end of all things, the Blessed will say, “We never lived anywhere but in Heaven.”

Now, my path is Yoga, and without it I would probably not have understood the enlightened Christian view which that expresses — but the words were very meaningful to me. My guru (Yogi Amrit Desai) puts it in similar terms: “Everything you have ever wanted, everything you need, is here now, in this moment. What you have to learn is simply to be in the moment — that is Heaven on earth.”

As I asked myself in another letter I wrote today, why am I writing this? And the answer is always the same. To reach out and join hands with someone else who is in the circle of light-bearers, of workers for the second coming of Christ within us all, as Christ-consciousness. To say thank you for being there. I hope you’re glad to hear that we are here, appreciating your works and doing our own. As Patricia Sun said in that wonderful article — we’re all coming home. Isn’t it wonderful!

“Apocalypse Now” has a paradoxically joyful message for those of us brave enough to dance with Ma Kali. Since it is such a vehicle of enlightenment, it is superficial to harangue it with this judgmental morality.

“Hucksters with talent exhaust me.” Mr. Rosenthal is very talented, too. “Is the war a cartoon or isn’t it?” What nonsense! Are you a cartoon? What are you doing, Rosenthal? Do you know? Do you really know?

Still, you know, it wasn’t a bad article. This 50th issue of THE SUN was exquisite. It was my first. Why not make Patricia Sun your logo? Auspicious! Auspicious!

We’re all teachers of one kind or another. THE SUN — even though I realize you seek only contributions that “make sense” and not necessarily outlines of your own opinions — is leading in a direction I do not want to follow. Two words came to mind after I saw your cover with the word, “Californicate and. . . .” (I can’t find the copy now): sophistry and sophomoric. Frankly, I find the definitions of both to be helpful. In my eyes now THE SUN is guilty of subtly fallacious reasoning . . . and marked by a shallow assumption of learning, empty grandiloquence, immaturity and callow statements.

Some of the articles and alleged fiction do not even “make sense” to me. “Why the News Spreads Fear Rather than Light” was great for teaching that what happens in this world should not be reported; a Big Censor should tell only those beautiful stories that we all love, etc. The interview with Steve Rizzuto (who relieved me of an unusual back pain recently) deserved a more nearly adult introduction, and certainly writers with master’s degrees should know English grammar! (You cannot know, obviously, how disgusted I am with a reference to the fact that a person “is older than me.” Everybody makes mistakes, but everybody deserves a good editor also.) The series on “Facing Cancer” bothers me because the woman has not sought out the best treatment available and may be teaching some young women that cancer is fatal so why take preventive measures? This doesn’t mean that I’m not for wholistic medicine, but “Do Doctors Do More Harm than Good?” looks as if it came right off the cover of a Reader’s Digest. Yes, the issue that came yesterday was beautiful — the editor’s note — and it was sexy, and “A Lady’s Journal: Reclining Morals” was a catchy title for competition in the world that THE SUN may want to reach. Most of the writing, in my opinion, doesn’t go anywhere. Sometimes the writers seem to create a new language which is unrelated to English as I know it.

All this criticism can be dismissed quickly by recognizing the fact that my fat corners are showing and that I know nothing about poetry, have no talent for writing fiction, am 60¾ years old, like cleanliness of body and home, think that rebels of the late 60’s and early 70’s should change their images before the 80’s etc., etc. In other words, thank you for reading this harangue, forgive me for being me, and remember that I do love you.

Not many people seem to consciously realize that we are plunging into a period of darkness. Certainly, my version of the darkness is not as dark as in the book I just finished reading, Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart, by Gerald Vizenor. This is a quote from the book:

When the oil is gone the culture is gone and when the culture is gone the government will take the trees on reservations. Traditions will end and white people will turn to the roads with evil and violent sex. When the oil is gone there will be nothing more to believe in here. White culture is refined from oil. No more habits to depend on, no transportation, no heating fuel, no chemicals, drugless, no plastics, no food from the sunbelts. People will gather in weird bunches based on their bizarre needs for sex and violence.

To me, it seems analogous to the Indian period from 1860-90. The Plains Indian way of life was based on the buffalo. When it was gone, their culture was gone. The same will be true of our culture. Even if alternative sources of energy are developed, our culture will die as we know it. The Indians had the option of replacing the buffalo with other animals (cattle). We have the option of replacing oil with other sources. However, just as the Indians’ culture died because the buffalo was the coin of their culture, our culture will die because oil is the coin of our culture. There seems little doubt that the oil will run out now — not only because it is a limited resource, but also because of the approaching jihad in which the Arab nations will revolt and stop exporting oil. If Khomeini seems mad in most respects, at least he seems aware of the fact that Western modernization and materialism is destroying the traditional Moslem way of life based on a sort of desert asceticism. Again, the situation is similar to what happened to the Native Americans. These traditional cultures see the power of technology and abandon their cultures for this glittering jewel. Their lack of technology and power is taken as being intrinsically inferior. They hate us but they still want the trinkets that we have. Yet, the incorporation of these marvels destroys their traditional way of life.

The solutions to these kinds of problems are difficult at best. Unfortunately, the path that most of the Plains Indians took seems to be the path Khomeini is heading for. It seems that either a culture takes the path of the war of defiance to maintain their traditional culture, using the tools acquired from the technological culture (though the acquisition of the tools usually has destroyed their traditional way), or they take the path of submission and assimilation to obtain the benefits of the technological culture (destroying their traditional way).

There is a third road, however. On the outside, it may look like the path of submission and assimilation, but with the important difference — the spiritual and mythological basis of their culture is never abandoned. They realize that the spiritual power their culture holds is more powerful in the long run than the giddy and short-lived injection of technological power. This is what Storm tried to show in his book, Seven Arrows. The Plains Indians did not take that road, however. The Hopis seem to be the only culture which seems truly to have taken that path. The way the Hopis resisted the onslaught is by what William Irwin Thompson calls daemonic vision. Only being able to see into the future 100 years, 1,000 years, even 10,000 years, can you see that the spiritual path is more beneficial.

So the Indian culture certainly holds some of the keys to the future of our survival. It is not in the daydream revivals of tribal heritage, or the radical politics of AIM, or the drunken assimilation of many tribal people. This Vizenor demonstrates to me.

The future exists in a true re-visioning. However, the people want the glory on this earth — NOW. The real revolution will go by unnoticed while the people pick up their flags and follow their Khomeinis and Jim Joneses into the darkness.

I don’t mean to rant and rave like this again. I guess I haven’t gotten off my soap box. Maybe I’ll just put a red, white, and blue bunting around the outside until it becomes the intricately sculpted spiralling pedestal Thompson stands on.