My friend Emerson lends reassurance across the years, via Emphatically Emerson, page 174. Writing in 1848, he says:

“Happy is he who looks only into his work to know if it will succeed, never into the times or public opinion; and who writes from the love of imparting certain thoughts and not from the necessity of sale — who writes always to the unknown friend.”
It could have been written this day, expressly for me, the writer of books that few buy but some treasure — or for you, regardless whether you write or blog or speak and regardless whether you have an audience.
Or, to paraphrase Henry Thoreau, write not the times; write the eternities.

Now, here is an extraordinary development! For decades, liberal thought in the West has put its faith in notions like Socialism or Capitalism, and has tended to implicitly assume that Christianity was the wave of the past. Yet all this time, Catholicism has been making huge inroads into Africa, pentacostal Christianity has been overrunning South America and other poorer regions and — who would have thought? — as it turns out, in China — well, read the report.

From “Andrew Brown’s Blog” in the Guardian, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/andrewbrown/2009/may/27/china-calvin-christianity/print/, via Schwartzreport.

Chinese Calvinism flourishes

The churches that follow Calvin are the third largest Christian grouping in the world. In China they hope to become the religion of the elite

John Calvin was a Frenchman, but he is being remembered in Geneva this week because it was here that he built Calvinism. Invited to reform the city in 1541, almost as what would now be called a management consultant, he formed an alliance with the city fathers. Over the next 20 years of preaching and pastoring they turned this tiny city, with a population then of only 10,000, into a model of church government and theology which has changed the world.

His followers now form the third-largest Christian grouping in the world. The world alliance of reformed churches claims 75 million members, and while this is a lower headline figure than the Anglican Communion’s 80 million, it is not inflated by 25 million nominal Anglicans in Britain.

Although Calvinism is shrinking in western Europe and North America, it is experiencing an extraordinary success in China. I spent some time on Monday talking to the Rev May Tan, from Singapore, where the overseas Chinese community has close links with mainland China. The story she told of the spread of Calvinist religion as an elite religion in China was quite extraordinary. There may be some parallels with the growth of Calvinism in South Korea, where the biggest presbyterian churches in the world are to be found, but it’s absolutely unlike the pattern in Africa and Latin America. There, the fastest growing forms of Christianity are pentecostal, and they are spreading among the poor.

But in China neither of those things are to be true.

Calvinists despise pentecostalists. They shudder at unbridled emotion. If they are slain in the spirit, it is with a single, decorous thump: there’s to be no rolling afterwards. And in China, the place where Calvinism is spreading fastest is the elite universities, fuelled by prodigies of learning and translation. Wang Xiaochao, a philosopher at one of the Beijing universities, has translated the two major works of St Augustine, the Confessions and the City of God, into Chinese directly from Latin. Gradually all the major works of the first centuries of the Christian tradition are being translated directly from the original languages into Chinese.

All of this is happening outside the control of the official body which is supposed to monitor and supervise the churches in China. Instead, it is the philosophy departments at the universities, or the language departments and the departments of literature and western civilisation that are the channel.

“The [officially recognised] churches are not happy with universities, because it is not within their control. And their seminaries are not at the intellectual level of the universities,” says Dr Tan. “Chinese Christianity using Chinese to do Christian thinking has become a very interesting movement.”

Many of the missionaries who tried to bring Christianity to China before the communists took over where presbyterians, and other sorts of Calvinist. But that does not explain why Calvinism should be the preferred theology of the house churches and the intellectuals now. Dr Tan suggests that this is because it is Protestant: that is to say it can be made much more convincingly native than Roman Catholicism, since presbyterian congregations choose their own pastors. This is, I suspect, enormously important at a time when China is recovering from a century and a half of being the victim of western powers; the pope’s insistence on appointing Catholic bishops is unacceptable to the government and perhaps to the people too.

If she goes to preach at an official church, she says, “There will be perhaps 1000 people and 95% of them are over 65. So it’s a sunset church. But if I went to house church – there would be 1000 people; perhaps 20 of them in their 50s, and all the rest are youngsters. The older ones will all be professors at the universities. So these are the future of the churches. They have registered pastors, and no access to seminaries: But they have youth, and future, and money.”

Calvinism isn’t a religion of subservience to any government. The great national myths of Calvinist cultures are all of wars against imperialist oppressors: the Dutch against the Spanish, the Scots against the English; the Americans against the British. So when the Chinese house churches first emerged from the rubble of the Cultural Revolution in the 80s and 90s “They began to search what theology will support and inform [them]. They read Luther and said, ‘not him’. So they read Calvin, and they said ‘him, because he has a theology of resistance.’ Luther can’t teach them or inform them how to deal with a government that is opposition.”

And, though the communists stigmatised Christianity as a foreign religion, they also and still more thoroughly smashed up the traditional religions of China: “The communist, socialist critique of traditional religion, and of Confucianism has been effective”, she says: “The youngsters think it is very cool to be Christian. Communism has removed all the obstacles for them to come to Christianity.”

The most conservative estimates of the new converts to Christianity is 500,000; there is a new church built every month. Calvinist Christianity has a culture of phenomenal industry. Calvin himself, in his time in Geneva, preached every day and twice on Sundays: shorthand writers at the foot of his pulpit took down 108 volumes of his sermons, though most of these have been lost and his reputation rests on the books and pamphlets that he wrote himself. In China now, this kind of Christianity is seen as forward-looking, rational, intellectually serious, and favourable to making money.

“Very soon”, said Dr Tan, “Christians will become the majority of university students … that could happen.”

It would be astonishing if China were to become a great power in the Christian world, as well as in the economic one. But things just as strange have happened in the past. Who could have foreseen, when Augustine was writing those huge books now translated into Chinese, that barbarous Europe would become the centre of Christian civilisation, and his homeland in North Africa would become entirely Muslim?

Grandmoms getting their first glimpse

Fresh from the warmer, courtesy of the nurse holding her up. At this point (and until Friday, actually) we hadn’t gotten to see Sarah.

Father and father

Grandmom Hilfer

Grandmom DeMarco and little stranger.

Sarah, Matt, and Emma

Mom, looking a little tired, a little smug

Pop and his new idol.

I have a number of very intelligent friends who nonetheless seem to believe that the world’s events are pre-determined by a relatively small number of people engaged in conspiracies. I have no doubt that conspiracies exist, and that some of them succeed. (I am, after all, of the generation that in its youth, within five years, saw the public murder of JFK, RFK and Martin Luther King, all supposedly the work of deranged lone gunmen.) Still, mostly life doesnt happen that way. Not every conspiracy is put together from this side of the veil. Michael Ventura’s latest column in The Austin (Texas) Chronicle is a case in point.

MICHAEL VENTURA

LETTERS AT 3AM -
THE MOM, THE BOOK, THE KID AND THE NUN

- Austin Chronicle -
May 22, 2009

    Psychology and sociology pretty much explain my life until about age 10. After that, something else, for which I have no name, took over.
    My mother must have pondered what to do with her 10-year-old when New York City’s public school system informed her the kid’s reading score was that of a high school senior. Or junior. It was an “nior” sound. I can’t swear which. What with caring for 5-year-old twins and a 3-year-old, Mama hadn’t much to spare for her eldest anymore. (Pa, he went thataway months before.) But she made time to discover the Landmark Book Club, which sent out volumes designed for curious children.
    I’d been reading encyclopedias hungrily since the end of third grade, but a Landmark volume, The Wright Brothers, was the first hardcover that was all my own, read again and again until the next arrived, The First Men in the World — a book that changed our lives. On its colorful jacket a mastodon upset two blond men clad in furs. They held spears. Cro-Magnon men they were, successors to Neanderthals. Difficult, now, to express or decipher my love for that book – read it so many times it was almost memorized, until the word “evolution” seemed, magically, the key to all mystery.
    Wednesdays, Catholic kids left public school early to attend catechism classes at a Catholic school. We were instructed in our religion by a stern nun whose name I’ve forgotten. Came her lesson on Adam and Eve, I eagerly raised my hand and explained that Adam and Eve must have been Cro-Magnons, or perhaps Neanderthals. The word “evolution” passed my lips. Sister bade me step forth and put my hand on her desk, palm down. She rapped my knuckles with six swift strokes of a wooden ruler.
    I didn’t resent the punishment as such. If you messed up, you got hit. That’s how things were. But I’d never been good at anything, and here it was recognized by no less an entity than New York City that I was good at something, even if it was only reading – not much street cred for reading, but better than nothing. That nun’s ruler drove me to tearful fury. I declared I was standing up for truths I’d discovered, but really my response had more to do with pride. To be punished for the one thing I was good at was more than my 10-year-old pride could tolerate.
    “I’m never going back there,” I announced to my mother when I got home. “I’m not a Catholic anymore.”
    I meant it, and my mother took me at my word. I was that kind of kid and she was that kind of mother.
   We searched for a different church. Tried Quaker services twice, our tribe of five dressed in our best and even the twins awed into stillness. But Mama probably figured that, being Sicilian, we’d make lousy Quakers.
    Next came a church with a name that didn’t sound religious: Unitarian. Mama attended the service while my siblings and I were put into Sunday school classes by age. What was discussed in my first Sunday school session? Evolution! I was overjoyed. What a church! I needn’t believe in God, I needn’t believe in anything, and the people were so nice. As far as I ever learned, a commitment to reason and kindness was the ideal of Unitarian belief. For them, the word “God” seemed to mean the principle of reason in a reasonable universe. (Not until I grew up did that seem as naïve a notion as any in Christendom.)
    Now my tale becomes intricate and long, but its telling must be brief.
    At that Unitarian Sunday school, I met Dave. Remember that name. Poverty and insanity plagued my family, and when I was 13 it fell apart. I was on my own. After a circuitous, solitary and serendipitous journey, a Unitarian minister’s family took me in, saving my life, while All Souls Unitarian Church of Manhattan supplied funds for my support. I attended a small, extraordinary high school, Coburn Classical Institute, in Waterville, Maine, where Mr. Carlo, Mr. Judson and Mrs. Willard taught English and history remarkably well. Without them I could not have become a writer. (I would spend two fragmentary years at colleges where education wasn’t nearly as rigorous. Those Coburn teachers constituted all my formal education.) Throughout high school Dave and I kept in touch.
    And here it gets weird. Stripped of nuance, it goes like this.
    I’m 20-ish. My siblings, my mother, and I live in a 2-bedroom apartment in the Bronx. Mama works as a file clerk, I’m a typist, and we make ends meet. While I’m doing that, enter Irene and Anne – women my age, of whose existence I am unaware. They meet by chance at a hostel in Europe. Their meeting is the most pivotal event of my adult life, and I wasn’t even there. Had no idea.
    Not much time passes. Anne meets Dave. They marry. More time passes. Irene is now in New Mexico, where she meets Janette. Janette goes back to her native Texas to be with her boyfriend, Butch, in Lubbock. Irene drifts to Lubbock. Irene meets Crash. Crash has never seen the sea.
    By this time, Anne and Dave live in Oakland. I’m drifting around the country, 27-ish by now. I stay a few weeks in Oakland with Anne and Dave, then head to Santa Cruz to live on the sofa of Sarah and Duke – Duke being a friend met at a Unitarian summer camp during high school. Irene and Crash visit Dave and Anne so that Crash can see the sea. I visit Dave and Anne while Irene and Crash are there. I’m about to hitchhike to Nashville for Mikey’s wedding. Crash invites me to ride with him and Irene as far as Lubbock. I’d never heard of Lubbock. I go with them and stay at 14th Street and Avenue W during a snowstorm — among other residents of that house are Butch Hancock, Joe Ely and Jimmy Dale Gilmore. I dig it there. I bus to Nashville for Mikey’s wedding, hitch to New York to see my family, get a ride to Boston to see friends, and run into Watson, who was a camper in my cabin when I was a high school counselor at that Unitarian camp. Watson tells me he’s about to drive to New Mexico. I say, “Drop me off in Lubbock.” After two years in the Panhandle I drift down to Austin just as some wildcat journalists start The Austin Sun. They give me a job. The rest of my life happens next: 30-odd years, so far, as a working writer.
    (A strange aside: I’d decided not to visit Dave and Anne’s for dinner with Irene and Crash. But, when standing quite alone, a voice said, “Go. It will change your life.” Cross-my-heart-and-spit, that happened.)
    If Mama hadn’t subscribed to a book club… if I hadn’t protested my punishment… if Mama hadn’t found the Unitarians… if, through them, I hadn’t met Dave, Duke, and Watson, and gone to camp and Coburn… if Irene hadn’t met Anne, if Anne hadn’t met Dave… if Mikey hadn’t married Martha… if Irene hadn’t met Janette and Crash… well, my life is unimaginable without all that, yet these crisscrossing meetings had little to do with me. What does one make of a pattern like this? What does one call it? How does one possibly untangle its elements?
    That nun, whom I’ve maligned all my life – now I see that had she been tolerant and kind, she’d have ruined me! Nothing that guided my path after age 10 would have happened. What does one do with a fact like that?
    Every now and again I go to Mass. I sit in the back. I like the atmosphere of Catholicism. Next time I mean to light a candle for that nun, thanking her and the saints she believed in – the Blessed Mother who looks after children, Saint Christopher who guides wanderers, and Saint Anthony who finds what’s lost. Her vehement faith and stern ways had as much to do with setting me on my path as anything else, and, until now, I’ve never thanked her.
   How did G’Kar of Babylon 5 put it? “A brilliant cascade of cause and effect. Isn’t the universe an amazing place? I wouldn’t live anywhere else!”
   My nun would have expressed the same idea differently: “God works in mysterious ways.”

[This came while I was at my daughter's, waiting for the new arrival. I don't have the ability to bother you all from there, so it had to wait till I returned.

[Paul Hawken was famous, some decades ago, less as the co-founder of Smith & Hawken, a supplier of quality tools, than as a proponent of a focused optimism about the world, its people, and what can be done, in the face of the usual slick pessimism that always says nothing is getting better, everything's controlled and rotten, and oh by the way, we're doomed. (I like his answer to that: "There is a rabbinical teaching that says if the world is ending and the Messiah arrives, first plant a tree, and then see if the story is true.")

[And I very much like the story he tells about how the world turned against slavery. First came a few men working from a religious belief. Then came organizations with the very impractical goal of abolition. Then came decades of persecution, ridicule, sacrifice and in some cases martyrdom (Lovejoy, in the United States in the 1830s, for instance). Then came victory. As he points out, similar organizations fighting similar campaigns are all over the place today. This is not a sign of hopelessness!

[In all, an inspiring talk that I thought I'd like to help share more widely. Pass it along to your friends.]

University of Portland, May 3rd, 2009

“When I was invited to give this speech, I was asked if I could give a simple short talk that was “direct, naked, taut, honest, passionate, lean, shivering, startling, and graceful.” Boy, no pressure there.

But let’s begin with the startling part. Hey, Class of 2009: you are going to have to figure out what it means to be a human being on earth at a time when every living system is declining, and the rate of decline is accelerating. Kind of a mind-boggling situation – but not one peer-reviewed paper published in the last thirty years can refute that statement. 

Basically, the earth needs a new operating system, you are the programmers, and we need it within a few decades.

This planet came with a set of operating instructions, but we seem to have misplaced them. Important rules like don’t poison the water, soil, or air, and don’t let the earth get overcrowded, and don’t touch the thermostat have been broken. Buckminster Fuller said that spaceship earth was so ingeniously designed that no one has a clue that we are on one, flying through the universe at a million miles per hour, with no need for seatbelts, lots of room in coach, and really good food – but all that is changing.

There is invisible writing on the back of the diploma you will receive, and in case you didn’t bring lemon juice to de code it, I can tell you what it says: YOU ARE BRILLIANT, AND THE EARTH IS HIRING. The earth couldn’t afford to send any recruiters or limos to your school. It sent you rain, sunsets, ripe cherries, night blooming jasmine, and that unbelievably cute person you are dating. Take the hint. And here’s the deal: Forget that this task of planet-saving is not possible in the time required. Don’t be put off by people who know what is not possible. Do what needs to be done, and check to see if it was impossible only after you are done.

When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: If you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren’t pessimistic, you don’t understand data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren’t optimistic, you haven’t got a pulse. What I see everywhere in the world are ordinary people willing to confront despair, power, and incalculable odds in order to restore some semblance of grace, justice, and beauty to this world. The poet Adrienne Rich wrote, “So much has been destroyed I have cast my lot with those who, age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.” There could be no better description. Humanity is coalescing. It is reconstituting the world, and the action is taking place in schoolrooms, farms, jungles, villages, campuses, companies, refuge camps, deserts, fisheries, and slums.

You join a multitude of caring people. No one knows how many groups and organizations are working on the most salient issues of our day: climate change, poverty, deforestation, peace, water, hunger, conservation, human rights, and more. This is the largest movement the world has ever seen.

Rather than control, it seeks connection. Rather than dominance, it strives to disperse concentrations of power. Like Mercy Corps, it works behind the scenes and gets the job done. Large as it is, no one knows the true size of this movement. It provides hope, support, and meaning to billions of people in the world. Its clout resides in idea, not in force. It is made up of teachers, children, peasants, businesspeople, rappers, organic farmers, nuns, artists, government workers, fisherfolk, engineers, students, incorrigible writers, weeping Muslims, concerned mothers, poets, doctors without borders, grieving Christians, street musicians, the President of the United States of America, and as the writer David James Duncan would say, the Creator, the One who loves us all in such a huge way.

There is a rabbinical teaching that says if the world is ending and the Messiah arrives, first plant a tree, and then see if the story is true.  Inspiration is not garnered from the litanies of what may befall us; it resides in humanity’s willingness to restore, redress, reform, rebuild, recover, reimagine, and reconsider. “One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice,” is Mary Oliver’s description of moving away from the profane toward a deep sense of connectedness to the living world.

Millions of people are working on behalf of strangers, even if the evening news is usually about the death of strangers. This kindness of strangers has religious, even mythic origins, and very specific eighteenth-century roots. Abolitionists were the first people to create a national and global movement to defend the rights of those they did not know. Until that time, no group had filed a grievance except on behalf of itself. The founders of this movement were largely unknown – Granville Clark, Thomas Clarkson, Josiah Wedgwood – and their goal was ridiculous on the face of it: at that time three out of four people in the world were enslaved. Enslaving each other was what human beings had done for ages. And the abolitionist movement was greeted with incredulity. Conservative spokesmen ridiculed the abolitionists as liberals, progressives, do-gooders, meddlers, and activists. They were told they would ruin the economy and drive England into poverty. But for the first time in history a group of people organized themselves to help people they would never know, from whom they would never receive direct or indirect benefit. And today tens of millions of people do this every day. It is called the world of non-profits, civil society, schools, social entrepreneurship, and non-governmental organizations, of companies who place social and environmental justice at the top of their strategic goals. The scope and scale of this effort is unparalleled in history.

The living world is not “out there” somewhere, but in your heart. What do we know about life? In the words of biologist Janine Benyus, life creates the conditions that are conducive to life. I can think of no better motto for a future economy. We have tens of thousands of abandoned homes without people and tens of thousands of abandoned people without homes. We have failed bankers advising failed regulators on how to save failed assets. Think about this: we are the only species on this planet without full employment. Brilliant. We have an economy that tells us that it is cheaper to destroy earth in real time than to renew, restore, and sustain it. You can print money to bail out a bank but you can’t print life to bail out a planet. At present we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it gross domestic product. We can just as easily have an economy that is based on healing the future instead of stealing it. We can either create assets for the future or take the assets of the future. One is called restoration and the other exploitation. And whenever we exploit the earth we exploit people and cause untold suffering. Working for the earth is not a way to get rich, it is a way to be rich.

The first living cell came into being nearly 40 million centuries ago, and its direct descendants are in all of our bloodstreams. Literally you are breathing molecules this very second that were inhaled by Moses, Mother Teresa, and Bono. We are vastly interconnected. Our fates are inseparable. We are here because the dream of every cell is to become two cells. In each of you are one quadrillion cells, 90 percent of which are not human cells. Your body is a community, and without those other microorganisms you would perish in hours. Each human cell has 400 billion molecules conducting millions of processes between trillions of atoms. The total cellular activity in one human body is staggering: one septillion actions at any one moment, a one with twenty-four zeros after it. In a millisecond, our body has undergone ten times more processes than there are stars in the universe – exactly what Charles Darwin foretold when he said science would discover that each living creature was a “little universe, formed of a host of self-propagating organisms, inconceivably minute and as numerous as the stars of heaven.”
 
So I have two questions for you all: First, can you feel your body? Stop for a moment. Feel your body. One septillion activities going on simultaneously, and your body does this so well you are free to ignore it, and wonder instead when this speech will end. Second question: who is in charge of your body? Who is managing those molecules? Hopefully not a political party. Life is creating the conditions that are conducive to life inside you, just as in all of nature. What I want you to imagine is that collectively humanity is evincing a 20 deep innate wisdom in coming together to heal the wounds and insults of the past.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once asked what we would do if the stars only came out once every thousand years. No one would sleep that night, of course. The world would become religious overnight. We would be ecstatic, delirious, made rapturous by the glory of God. Instead the stars come out every night, and we watch television.

This extraordinary time when we are globally aware of each other and the multiple dangers that threaten civilization has never happened, not in a thousand years, not in ten thousand years. Each of us is as complex and beautiful as all the stars in the universe. We have done great things and we have gone way off course in terms of honoring creation. You are graduating to the most amazing, challenging, stupefying challenge ever bequested to any generation. The generations before you failed. They didn’t stay up all night. They got distracted and lost sight of the fact that life is a miracle every moment of your existence. Nature beckons you to be on her side. You couldn’t ask for a better boss. The most unrealistic person in the world is the cynic, not the dreamer. Hopefulness only makes sense when it doesn’t make sense to be hopeful. This is your century. Take it and run as if your life depends on it.”

Last night my elder child, my daughter Sarah, gave birth to a daughter, Emma.

None of the things that might have gone wrong, did. Mother and child are healthy and that’s all that really matters. The fact that Sarah seems happy and that Emma seems placid (clearly, practicing how to say my name) is just a big bonus.

I have been so pleased that my daughter is part of a truly happy and supportive marriage. She and Matthew will make wonderful parents.

This is going to come as a shock, though, to a dog and several cats, all of whom up until now thought they were people.

Enigmatic title, right? Here’s a quote from the guys upstairs, trying to give us analogies so that we could get a sense of the nature of physical reality.

“The only things that come to mind now that are going to help are the sphere and the hologram, those two concepts. If you see yourselves as holographically part of the entirety of the universe, this doesn’t mean that you’re a tiny part of something huge, it means you’re an integral part of the whole thing, and size is not relevant. It’s just really not relevant. And the sphere again, is only used as an analogy of completion, of totality. It doesn’t mean that reality is literally a sphere.”

                                                                                    — from session 18, January 11, 2002

Some thoughts from my book The Sphere and the Hologram, just published. The following is the conclusion of that book of transcripts.

Process

When I was young I didn’t understand why Edgar Cayce had so many perplexities, hesitations, and fears about what he did. It seemed clear to me that he had been given a special gift: Why not just use it and rejoice in it? Why second-guess it all the time? Why wonder about its accuracy? Cayce used to say, apparently in a sort of teeth-clenched way, that if one child was ever hurt by the things that came through when he was in trance, that was the end of the whole business for him. I used to wonder, why? So it has been interesting to participate in this process from the inside; to exchange ideas and analysis with Rita, a trained psychologist who also knows from her own experience what I’m talking about. And it has been interesting to see how little of the reasons for my own perplexities, hesitations, and fears I have been able to communicate clearly, even to her. It gives me a whole different perspective on Edgar Cayce as a man.

I see more clearly now why Cayce did not see himself as a gifted seer, a favored communicant with the other side. Cayce was saved by his own humility. He knew the reasons for his own perplexities, hesitations, and fears. He was well aware how little he knew about what he was doing. He knew that every time he went into a trance, the information that came would come from somewhere beyond his control, which meant he had no way to filter it. The information came from someone (but he didn’t know who) and it would be stated with great confidence (but he didn’t know if the confidence was warranted) and it would supposedly be given with benevolent intent (but, as he didn’t know who was providing it, he was forced to hope that was true). What’s more, the information came to him while he was in trance, so he didn’t even get to hear it as it came through. Talk about taking things on faith! No wonder he was worried! Plus, of course, his journey was so long. By the end of his life in 1945 he had come to integrate a lot of what his voice had said from trance, but in the early days it must have seemed to him a mixture of blasphemy and nonsense.

When I was young, reading about Edgar Cayce, I thought of him as one of a group of special men and women, set apart from ordinary men and women, who somehow had abilities most of us didn’t have and didn’t expect to have. Therefore I couldn’t see him as a man, not really. Oh, I read that he had a wife and children and an external career as a photographer, and I read that he had his struggles on many levels. But the reality didn’t really sink in. His struggles seemed almost irrelevant to his real story, which was “of course” that he could go into a trance and bring in medical and other information. And because I could not see Cayce as an ordinary man (with an unusual gift) I misunderstood everything I read. Certainly I misunderstood its importance for my own life. I would make a small bet that nearly everyone who reads about him or others like him misunderstands in a similar way.

Anyone who comes away from this book thinking, “wow, Frank is really special” is wrong except in the sense that we are each special. I will say it as clearly as I can. As far as I can tell, the information is available and can be retrieved by anyone who wants to try. We don’t have to live as disconnected individuals on the long, hard, solitary Downstairs path. There’s no reason you can’t do what I learned to do, and there’s no reason to think you won’t be as good at it as anybody else. Only, don’t think that acquiring access is going to solve your problems. It’s more likely to give you a new set of problems to work on. Nothing wrong with that, just be prepared.

The one danger I see in this kind of work is that of psychic inflation. If you think that this work makes you something special, you risk turning it into a curse. It should be obvious that the whole point of the process is to bring information not from the part of us that is in time and space, but from the part that is beyond time and space. How can we do that if our ego needs are driving us to try to assure success?

I consider myself fortunate that the gift of being able to talk to the other side did not manifest when I was younger, particularly when I was still trapped in a succession of menial jobs. Had the gift come before I had made a place to stand in the world, the temptation to identify myself with the gift (that is, to take credit for it) would have been great. If I had allowed myself to measure my worth as a person with the ability to produce acceptable results, would I not have been tempted to cheat? In any case, the need for results would have put the cart disastrously before the horse. I might have done quite a bit of damage to others and to myself. This work has to come from the heart, not from the ego, and for most of us that will be a struggle. To the degree that the work comes from ego, the quality of the material is compromised.

As has been said more than once, our essential oneness is more evident outside of time and space than it is here. Therefore, it is true, though it has been expressed as a joke, that “you’re special, just like everybody else.” It’s important to remember both halves of the statement. You, yourself, were specifically created to conduct the experiment of being you. No one else is you. Your choices do matter to the larger being on the other side, call it what we may. But by the same token, this is true of everyone else. This seems to me very close to the old Christian way of seeing each of us as God’s children, as precious to him and as interesting, regardless of external circumstances. (It is also a damn sight more attractive to me than the idea that people are economic or political digits, to be used rather than valued.)

So, remember that you are unique and therefore special; remember that so is everyone else you will ever know. You are not insignificant. Neither is any of them, regardless the color of their skin, the sound of their accent, the content of their bank account or the clarity of their thought. This is not empty, high-sounding, meaningless sloganeering. If the guys may be trusted, it’s a straight description of fact.

The Meaning of the Material

Not so easy to sum up the results of this exploration. Not so easy, particularly, to make it clear in advance to each of you who reads this book the importance of this information for you. After all, each comes to it with different assumptions, abilities, prejudices, emotional makeup, and educational background – to say nothing of life-plan and affiliations. Still, the attempt must be made.

The central problem with all this material is simply that the picture it presents is at such variance with the picture painted by “common sense.”

Common sense says that the past is dead, the future not yet created, and the present moment is all there is. This material says the past is still alive, the future is already alive, and the present is as alive as either – no more, no less.

Common sense says that the present is the one and only present. What you see is what you get. This material says that this time, and all times, exist in multiple versions, with a version corresponding to the results of every possible choice made by every agent.

Common sense says that reincarnation must be true or untrue. This material says it’s more a matter of definition than of an either-or choice. In any case, it suggests that our ideas on the subject are confused.

Common sense says that in this life we must be either individuals (as to all appearances we are) or in some mystical way all part of one thing. This material says, again, it’s a matter of definition, and could be seen either way.

Common sense says that they on their side (assuming that common sense would concede that “they” exist) must be either individuals or in some mystical way all part of one thing. This material says that here, too, it’s a matter of definition.

Common sense says “we” in time-space and “they” outside of time-space are different beings. This material says the difference between us could be considered more a difference in emphasis than a difference in kind, with the major difference between us being the difference between their turf (non-material reality) and ours (time-space, or what I call 3D Theater).

Common sense says that life consists of good things and bad, or problems and opportunities, stemming from the conflict of forces. This material says that we – and they, working with us – plan our lifetimes both beforehand and during the lifetimes. All our problems are opportunities, because they are all chosen by us in the planning of our life.

Common sense says that conscience (if it exists) is something like a scorekeeper or a nag. This material says conscience is a homing mechanism.

Common sense says that our health, like other aspects of our lives, depends on many things over which we have little or no control. This material says we have far more control over our health than we commonly suspect, and that how much control we have depends on our state of being.

Common sense, for many people (not all) argues that improving the world is done primarily by interaction with others. This material says internal work is as effective as external work, and often more effective.

Common sense for many says that to overcome disaster or even to lead a successful life, we must do many external things (although few agree on what specific things). This material says the most effective thing we can do, in the face of disaster or in ordinary life, is to hold our center.

Common sense says that the meaning of the manner of our death is confined to this side. This material says that how we die here is the equivalent to how we are reborn into the other side.

And so it goes. Everything common sense says that is based on our assumptions about time and space falls down if those assumptions are incorrect. That includes questions about good and evil and about our emotions (gradients between what is and what we prefer, they say) and the meaning and nature of our lives. They see our lives as lived in different versions, equally real, with us choosing versions as if wandering in a maze of freedom. It even affects their view of extraterrestrials, for they are as close to them – as much a part of them – as to us. In short, our lives appear quite different to them than they do to us.

Now the question is, what are we going to do with this information? How can we check it, expand upon it, use it? That, dear reader, is at least partly up to you. Fortunately you are not alone, however much you may sometimes think so.

Saw the movie today. Won’t say much about it, lest I spoil your experience, but I will say that the kid who plays James T. Kirk as a young man is going to have a big career. He has that certain something — the sort of appeal shared by actors as diverse as Tom Hanks, Matt Damon and Harrison Ford. Many of the actors were good, especially the two who played McCoy and Scott, but the one who played Kirk really stood out. 

Of course, Hollywood being Hollywood, they had to hoke things up and come up with an ending (the coda, really) that was not believable, whereas they could easily have come up with one that was. But they always have their eye on the teenage consumer, so it is too much to ask that they consider grown up sensibilities as well. We’re lucky when it is as good as this one was. I did enjoy it.

leads me to reprint this conversation with Gene Roddenberry that I made into a column for The Meta Arts online magazine last December.

Star Trek, the individual and the community

by Frank DeMarco

Gene Roddenberry was a visionary. The man who created Star Trek set out to influence American culture in certain very specific constructive ways, and succeeded to an extent that he can hardly have imagined. Star Trek influenced America – and far beyond. What part of the world doesn’t know of Kirk, Spock, Bones, Sulu, Uhura, and Chekov?

Not the least fascinating aspect of this ability to talk to others on the other side is that we can ask them questions. Here’s an edited transcript of Gene Roddenberry talking about society and the individual and the process of inspiring society with new ways of seeing things.

On May 14, 2007, having been watching Star Trek videos and re-reading Upton Sinclair’s Lanny Budd novels, I had several altered-state sessions with the guys upstairs. They started off, as the often do, with very abstract statements, hard to absorb:

There are several points to be considered together:

- quality in the external life of the individuals in the community
- individual interest as actually community interest seen out of context
- dissatisfaction – unnecessary dissatisfaction – in what is possible within community
- all this as a parallel to what we have been saying of your internal lives.

We do not apologize for the fact that this is not clear to you. If it were clear at first sight, how new could it be? We want to show you individualism and collectivism in the light of newly seen context.

That was a little awkward. Am I losing the beam or are you in need of some coffee over there?

You will find, if you look back (or forward!) that when you are prospectively grasping very abstract statements, the process takes so much of your attention that grammar itself suffers, let alone metaphor.

Interesting. Okay, I get the idea: New context for our social ideas will produce a new point of view in the way that doing a Copernican shift will rearrange our ideas of ourselves and past lives, etc.

It might be better to put it this way: As you learn that you are not so much an individual but a transient collection of threads – or rather, that such a collection is what it means to be an individual – your view of your life changes. Your possibilities expand, and certain mysteries resolve. You can communicate with what you had thought of as “past” lives; you can access infinite knowledge; you can change your past, present and future. The “superhuman” abilities promised you by scriptures are right there in front of you, or rather, the ignition key is now in your hands. Similarly, society seen as if it were an individual.

This is very difficult work for you.

Yes – so many threads you are wanting to weave and I can scarcely stay up with you, let alone weave them.

You need other tools to make the handling of abstractions easier and more skilled.

It’s true and I have often felt it. The only thing I know to do is to keep it as simple as I can, sentence by sentence, and hope that you won’t forget where we are going, for if I try to hold it, I get lost. I get overwhelmed. Which thing to say first? How to make so complex a sentence that it will hold the various elements in relationship – and yet still be readable?

This is why so much “channeled” material comes out in the pompous, inflated language of the subconscious: it is beyond the ability of the interpreter to both render faithfully and translate into more normal language. It is one of your qualifications, that you are good with language, somewhat picky about it as a conveyor of meaning, free enough concerning structure to allow yourself to do what is needed, and above all determined to say it so that it may be understood. Getting these qualities in a medium means forfeiting other valuable but contradictory qualities. Hence, specialization.

I can see that. Oh! That’s why earlier you planted the seed in my mind about talking to Gene Roddenberry! It will come best via an individual, and hence one who had thought about it. And I have been watching Star Trek movies including the “making of” stuff they include in the DVDs. I’ll give you this. You guys are pretty clever. All right, I will be very pleased to talk to Gene Roddenberry about all this.

You understand,

Yes, you don’t need to say it. What he will say here, from his present perspective, isn’t necessarily what he would say if he were still here in a single-life perspective. Since I don’t know anything about him except that he had the original Star Trek ideas (or got them from Wesley Bateman, if that is what happened) – I won’t even worry about conforming story to perception. Hopefully it will be easier, but in any case – we’ll see.

Gene Roddenberry, are you there? Or here, however we should look at it?

Like-vibrational souls seem to be a group when viewed from a certain focus. When viewed from a different focus, the like-vibrational teams will be partly or entirely different. No one is only one thing. To make that clearer, a baseball team is seen from a baseball-oriented focus. The members of that same team will not necessarily sort out in any predictable way when considered from ownership of one brand of car, or coverage by one kind of life insurance, or they might be sorted by political belief or ideology, or taste in art, or in wine, or in women. A very simple concept here: everybody has different handles, different vibrational signatures, that respond to different focuses. So, you experience me as part of a “team” that includes Franklin Roosevelt and Claude Bowers. Is this because we are a natural team, a sort of soul-family? Only in a given context. Claude Bowers is not necessarily interested in science fiction or television, or Abraham Lincoln. So, yes, I am here – for you, in this context. And I am “here” for others in different contexts. And this is true for all.

What the lesson of the day is, can be explained easier by reference to my own goals as a producer of television shows than abstractly (as you have found).

I wanted to show real people facing real problems; specifically I wanted to create a mirror in which we in the 20th century could see ourselves by contrast. Well, by contrast to what? To mankind as it could be if shaped by a different society. It could have been done by reference to a real or imagined past, but to do it against an imagined (received?) future offered greater leeway. Everything was possible.

The seven deadly sins still existed; they exist because people exist. The infinite potential range of emotion, skill, values, creativity, existed, because they exist in people, manifested more or manifested less, and in differing directions, according to circumstance. I am saying this: Creating a future matrix in which to place the future man, we created possibilities.

Start with a man (a person, yes, but say a man). He has our same innate range of possibilities – plus the things his society makes possible and ours does not, and minus the possibilities that ours makes possible and his does not. So – he is us as we would be in those circumstances. And the viewer, feeling that identity, infers the effect of the society by seeing the motives the man has – or does not have – in any given set of circumstances (also known as, “the plot”!).

How many times did viewers see and hear that the 23rd century does not use money? Whenever they heard the statement, it left a blank spot, for it is impossible to imagine a society without money. But it is not impossible to witness people whose actions are never motivated by fear of scarcity or the desire to amass a surplus. In short, it made no impression on the conscious mind, but a relatively great impression, cumulatively, on the subconscious pattern-imaging facility.

The means of transportation might be advanced – transporters, gravity-defying cars, spaceships – and this was accepted as a commonplace. The all-powerful all-connecting computers were accepted as magic, like any other marvel. The surroundings – strange worlds, spaceships, hostile or curious or indifferent races – were accepted with a shrug, so to speak, like horses in a horse opera. What was different, what was significant, what was meaningful, was the mental and emotional world of the captain and crew. That and nothing else is what turned a three-season show into a phenomenon that the fans kept alive. They weren’t attached to fist fights and transporters and dilithium crystals. They were relating to the possibilities in themselves that they could see only mirrored in the crew. Of course this doesn’t mean they knew this, at any level. They knew only that Star Trek had become important to them and they wanted to get as close to it as they could, emotionally.

So, as I said, start with the man. Then work your way logically – where is Spok when you need him? – to the society that will produce and nurture such abilities and such a view of the world.

It sounds like I have gone a long way away from our topic, but I have not. It is just that we are approaching from an unexpected direction.

You are saying, roughly, first get an accurate idea of who you are, then work to build a society that will support what you can become and want to become.

Well – not quite that. You as an individual are not what your society thinks you are. It is difficult to generalize because different subsets of society have different beliefs, but most would agree that you are one unit, proceeding moment by moment along the present that still somehow keeps being the past moving into the future. (A close look would reveal the absurdity of this view of things, but there it is.) If your subset is religious or is in some way psychically connected and intellectually congruent with the connection, it will say that you extend before birth and after death, though each will differ in specifics. Meanwhile – during your life on Earth – you are seen as having a physical heredity and perhaps a spiritual heredity; and a family, and certain interests and surroundings, and a given set of gifts and liabilities.

All well and good, and as epicycles, very serviceable. As descriptions of who and what you are – pathetic. This is a cartoon view of humanity. Because it is so, societies shaped around this view become cartoons as well. But they aren’t very funny.

No one in the Star Trek crew is an individual in the sense of existing in isolation, an end and a means to himself. The idea is an absurdity, easily seen in so small a mirror of earth life. Yet societies are set up either as one great beehive (Mao’s ideal for China) or as a series of megalithic organizational units (Hitler’s or Stalin’s ideals) or as tribes or families (multiple examples around Earth past and present) or as individuals. And it is the cult of the individual that is so dangerous in your time, as the cult of the beehive or the megalith was in mine.

Who can live without trees on the earth?

The quality of life is in the perfect interplay of millions of details. A good meal of nutritious and well prepared food doesn’t just happen. And if individualism is allowed to run far out of control, there can be a situation where it becomes impossible to have such a meal because too many necessary links have been snapped.

If the worlds here were to become unbreatheable, the ability to purchase canned air wouldn’t be lifesaving; it would only buy a postponement of the inevitable.

A society full of illiterates does not make possible [even] for those who can read the depth of services and knowledge offered by societies of widespread literacy – and this despite how much money one may offer for special services.

Star Trek kept the assumptions that past, present, future was the basic orientation. Travel into “the” past or “the” future still held on to these assumptions, but proposed exceptions to it. In the same way, travel to other dimensions, alternate probable worlds – you name it – still by implication assumes the same reality, “ordinary” reality.

What if we had made other assumptions and had been able to keep our audience with us? Suppose we had said, there is only the present (doing things one way) and it is 1/30th of a second ahead of whatever your senses report, and it is where the true magic of the world resides.

If Captain Kirk had been actively aware of all his other lives, active within his everyday consciousness, alive as he was, interacting continuously with him and with each other – and if he had realized that every one of them (and he himself, of course) was vitally tied to multitudes of others whose vibrations they had matched, would he have been the same man?

To look at it backwards, if he hadn’t been aware of himself as just one member of the crew, had thought of himself as the only important person, would he have been the same?

What if Kirk had been able to keep his sense of being one member of a team and had extended it internally as well? You are the captain of your extended self (from your point of view) because you are at the present, the point of application. Others in your group are too, from their point of view and in their present-point. So you have complete cooperation and complete individual free will and it all depends upon awareness of interconnection.

There it is, in a nutshell. And yes, this wasn’t so easy to bring across. We are not supermen here unless we were supermen there.

Thanks for making that effort, and I look forward to see what tomorrow brings. Thanks, too, for Star Trek. That was a good thing you did.