Pondering Mysteries

Koalas smell strongly of eucalyptus. So did my grandmother. Adult koalas look like old Jewish men (reference David Ben-Gurion and Lee Strasberg as seen below). My grandmother, however, was not Jewish, but a Spiritualist, in touch with an American Indian spirit guide.



Leviticus expressly forbids Spiritualism. It also forbids haircuts (19:27) and wearing clothes made out of more than one fabric,i.e. the polyester/cotton blend t-shirt (19:19). Koalas do not wear t-shirts. My grandmother did not cut her hair, but braided and wore it up in the fashion of her childhood. Neither did she wear t-shirts. Photographs show that Ben Gurion did on occasion cut his hair. Is this a signal to the gnostic community of his rejection of Leviticus' injunction against the Spiritualist church?



Seekers after knowledge lent my grandmother their house key, which she used to locate Bible verses relevant to their case. The Tree of Life, a diagram used in Kabbalah, can be thought of as a key or "map" that represents the structure of the universe.



Clark Gable nearly destroyed the t-shirt industry when he appeared without an undershirt in It Happened One Night. Claudette Colbert appeared without a shirt in Sign of the Cross while bathing in wild asses' milk. Polly Walker as Atia in Rome is more to my taste, none of which is germane to the case except to reinforce the Kinsey Institute's assertion that 54% of men think of sex several times a day, not every seven seconds as claimed by urban myth.



Tourists complain that koalas are fractious and not as cuddly as portrayed by the media, but it must be remembered that for the koala, posing for a photograph with a tourist bus at midday is like waking a human at 4 in the morning. Koalas are believed by the Aborigines to call the rain, though their name means "doesn't drink" because they get their moisture from eucalyptus trees. Eucalyptus trees = the kabbalistic tree of life-- kabbalah, koala-- coincidence? I think not.



The book of Deuteronomy is full of shit.

How to be Invisible While Defending the Constitution

A woman in California, Wendy Gonaver, was hired as an adjunct professor at the University of California in Fullerton, but refused to sign the loyalty oath that's still part of the orientation package for new hires.

“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of California against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of California; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties upon which I am about to enter.”
Gonaver says she has no problem with the Constitution, but saw the oath as coercive and therefore contrary to the Constitution it was meant to protect. No tickee, no washee, and without signing that last piece of paper (a more humane bureaucrat might have shrugged, slipped the unsigned paper into Gonaver's folder and worried about it later) they wouldn't give her the keys to the classroom.

It might have been a tempest in a teapot, except for California history, where the oath has been used as a club to enforce conformity. In 1950, thirty-one professors who refused to sign-- there was no other complaint against them-- were fired. It was ongoing protest against this McCarthyism on campus that led to the Free Speech Movement in Berkely and the subsequent social protests of the early Sixties.

There comes a time, even for the orneriest contrarian, when you have to ask yourself which points are worth arguing. I might have issues with some aspects of the laws of gravity, but if I question every point of existence, I turn into Brian Wilson and never get out of bed. When I had to sign one of these for a previous employer in the state of Michigan; I just shrugged, assumed it was a holdover from the McCarthy era, crossed my toes and signed the thing. I have no problem defending the Constitution against its enemies, since most of them are domestic anyway and there's very little travel involved. If the people who demand a show of loyalty are themselves enemies of the Constitution, they're asking me to sign an oath that calls for their own destruction. It's like Daffy duck insisting, "Shoot me NOW!" Mental reservations? Evasion? You bet, but I'm not stupid enough to tell them that. I needed a job.

The wise fool Nasrudin and his followers were walking through a crowded marketplace when a student asked Nasrudin, "what do you mean by the concept of "invisibility"? Just as Nasrudin was about to answer, they were surrounded by heavily armed soldiers-- there was another religious pogrom in progress, with the government intent on ferreting out unbelievers.

The soldiers pointed their weapons at the Sufi literature under Nasrudin's arm, and their leader demanded, "What's that you've got there?"

"A piece of atheistic trash, which I now burn," Nasrudin answered without a pause, and he ripped the book to pieces, set fire to the pages, and stomped on the ashes.

After the soldiers had left, Nasrudin turned to his students and said, "That's what I mean by invisibility."

The Dark NIght of the Soul

Upon the darkened night
the flame of love was burning in my breast
And by a lantern bright
I fled my house while all in quiet rest
Shrouded by the night
and by the secret stair I quickly fled
The veil concealed my eyes
while all within lay quiet as the dead

Oh Night, Thou was my guide
Oh Night more loving than the rising sun--
Oh Night that joined the lover
to the beloved one
transforming each of them into the other

Upon that misty night
in secrecy, beyond such mortal sight
Without a guide or light
than that which burned so deeply in my heart

That fire t'was led me on
and shone more bright than of the midday sun
To where he waited still
it was a place where no one else could come

Within my pounding heart
which kept itself entirely for Him
He fell into His sleep
beneath the cedars all my love I gave
And by the fortress walls
the wind would brush His hair against his brow
And with its smoothest hand
caressed my every sense it would allow

I lost myself to Him
and laid my face upon my lover's breast
And care and grief grew dim
as in the mornings mist became the light
There they dimmed amongst the lilies fair
There they dimmed amongst the lilies fair
There they dimmed amongst the lilies fair

The Dark Night of the Soul by St. John of the Cross
Adapted and set to music by Loreena McKennitt

“That which this anguished soul feels most deeply is the conviction that God has abandoned it, of which it has no doubt; that He has cast it away into darkness as an abominable thing . . . and this comes from the sense of being abandoned by God, being chastised and cast out by His wrath and heavy displeasure. All this and even more the soul feels now, for a terrible apprehension has come upon it that thus this despair will be with it for ever. It has also the same sense of abandonment with respect to all creatures, and that it is an object of contempt to all, especially to its friends.” The "Dark Night" got its name from John of the Cross, but something like it happens on almost every mystic path. Meister Eckhart talks about "leaving God for God", losing your personal, tribal concepts of the divine so they can be replaced by something closer to the Real, but sometimes that means God pushes you down the stairs with a helpful hand in the small of your back. Religious bigots like bin Laden or Dobson never feel abandoned at all, never question, and so stay stuck as spiritual infants convinced they have God's unlisted phone number and God (who strangely resembles them in a mirror) "sits up nights to admire them." Their concept of the Divine will always be small and mean and hunched by their own limitations.

Some dark comfort that the talons griping my soul in the dark once drew blood from the shoulder of Athene. If Jesus isn't abandoned in the garden when God ran from the po-pos to let him die screaming desolate on the cross, if some small part of his consciousness thinks he's going to get out of this, he's not really going to die, then it doesn't really count, does it? In shamanic experience, the Dark Night means your helper spirits leave you to have your body get torn apart, eaten and shat out by wild animals, and the task-- unless you decide to just lie there and stay dead-- is to reassemble the bloody chunks into something resembling a human being. One of the northern nations (Cree, I think) used to leave those exhibiting bizarre behavior alone in a lean-to for the winter-- if you reconstituted and were still alive in the Spring, then you were meant to be a shaman, but if you starved or froze to death, then it was just a schizophrenic episode and not a mystic experience at all. Odin lost an eye messing with this stuff, and probably counted himself lucky that it wasn't his left nut.