Lakota Nation: Black Elk's Center of the World

by Bernie Quigley for The Free Market News Network at 12/28/07

"It may be that some little root of the sacred tree still lives," Black Elk.

Of all the garden variety secession movements springing up today in North America, from Quebec Nation to the Republic of Texas and up to the Bear Republic of California then back again to Vermont and the Free State initiative here in New Hampshire, Lakota Nation is perhaps the most interesting.

The Argus Leader of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, reports that Lakota Indians, led by activist Russell Means, announced a plan recently for their people to withdraw from treaties their forefathers signed with the U.S. government. Lakota Nation seeks recognition for their effort to form a free and independent Lakota nation. The new nation is needed, the report said, because Indians have been "dismissed" by the United States and are tired of living under a colonial apartheid system.

None of these initiatives have a change of success unless California leads the way. Texas is already Mexican except for the rich oil people; Vermont will one day speak with the français in Acadia again; the Bear Republic will succumb to the Asian horde and the Russkie will stomp out the Newfie seperatists with one big boot now that they have planted the flag at the top of Canada. But the Lakota Nation is something else. It is a Ghost Dance. It is a spirit long thought dead - killed in slaughter at Wounded Knee - a spirit that suddenly awakened in the mid-Sixties and as Chief Joseph said, it is a spirit which will always walk among us.

Lakota always was and will continue to be when the white fellow with his city shoes and puffy L.L. Bean jacket succumbs with the loss of his hedge fund, derivatives and pension plan pegged to the falling dollar. Already he has no cousins or aunties. His religion is a dictatorship. His house is square and made of glass.

Lakota spirit lives in a round house, and as Black Elk said, Lakota lives therefore, “like the birds.” Lakota spirit will always be and it is everywhere. We name cars after it and states and movie stars. We call the name of Indian warrior spirit in battle. And most real Americans who have lost the Euro history like to claim to being "part Indian."

And Lakota Nation is, as Black Elk, the great Lakota shaman and prophet said, pointing north, “. . . the center of the world.”

And right now it actually is as the Mississippi River divides the world today uniting the U.S. east and west and all of the Eastern world and the Western world into one world.

Today, we see a reversal of Kipling’s maxim: East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet. Now, East and West, like the recently-photographed galaxy known as IC2163, swinging counterclockwise past its celestial partner NGC2207, appear to be about to form into one unified solar system. Now they cannot be kept apart. It almost appears as if history was waiting for this moment to bring these two forces together in unity. An ancient spiritual force from the East and a new-to-history technical force in the West, as the Dalai Lama generally expressed it recently.

These two forces could not have come together at any other time in history. Nor could they have flowed together into a unique new culture at any place other than the North American continent.

North America is the Aquarian continent, made up of all the world’s peoples, castes, races and religions, pouring freely in, as the water pours from the vessel of the Titan. And its epic tale, Huckelberry Finn, identifies the vortex, the Mississippi River. The water pours freely over the falls at Niagara to the sacred lakes of the Manitou, the Great Spirit, into Chicago thereabouts and down the Mississippi to where the Amish flourish, on to the sacred primal place of Elvis’ Graceland and out into the Gulf of Mexico.

This is the Aquarian mandala, which will find creative energy in centuries ahead. This means the development and enrichment of regional cultures on the North American continent, forging one another, helping one another and hating one another; forming new dynamic relationships and creating a new world.

We come together in a federalist state. With federalism, everyone is equal, but no one is connected. This is the Hamiltonian model of federalism and it is singularly responsible for how we have developed since 1776. Hamilton favored a vast, singular state with a central government to aid and abet industry and the business class. Thomas Jefferson envisioned instead a series of autonomous regions, each with their own provincial culture and life force. The Hamilton way is temporary, and once we are all here and found the place meant for us, we will stay here and grow here to our own Peoples, as Jefferson envisioned a free society.

As Revelation closes the gate for one epoch which began its historical march in Rome and Constantinople, the American Indian visionary opens a gate to the next. Here Black Elk is the perennial guide – from Cooper to novelist Charles Frazier -- for Natty Bumpo/Hawkeye the new arrival on this continent who has lost his orientation and is wandering with a sick soul in the desert of the new world. Here is Black Elk: “And the Voice said: Give them now the flowering stick that they may flourish, and the sacred pipe that they may know the power that is peace, and the wing of the white giant that they may have endurance and face all winds with courage.”

The recent novel Cold Mountain with its Indian guide is representative of the journey of the spirit as it unfolds on what still is a new continent and in what is surely a new age. As Bunyan’s Christian pilgrim sought a life of the highest integrity and moral perseverance in a world torn asunder in the 1600s, so Frazier speaks to us today in Cold Mountain. There are two Cold Mountains, one in China where Taoist sages and hermits have lived for ages, and one in North Carolina, considered sacred to Indians in those parts. At the beginning of the novel Frazier quotes the eighth century Taoist sage, Han shan: Men ask the way to Cold Mountain. Cold Mountain: there’s no through trail. It is a mandala novel; it begins with the character on a broken edge of a circle, but with an Indian guide in a brief but perfect life he finds his way to the center, whole.

Like Natty Bumpo, Frazier's hero finds wholeness and completion in the house of the Indian. It is the oldest and youngest of American stories. And it speaks well of the North American journey, a journey for all here which is just beginning.

The rabbis tell us that the gods hide in the lowest places. When I was a child we were told a story about a Texas lawman who died in the desert and was brought back to life - "born again" - by an Indian shaman. But he could not remember his name. He lost his history. And he no longer had Jesus but an Indian to guide him in the desert between East and West.

Each week we white folk were asked the important question: "Who is the Masked Man?"

We are the Masked Man. Our identity not yet revealed, even to ourselves.

Fascism with a Christian Face: The Grand Inquisitor at The New York Times

by Bernie Quigley for The Free Market News Network at 12/26/07

The NYTs and other major newspapers have opened on their op-ed pages a congenial and brotherly discussion of torture. Like the discussion of the use of nuclear weapons in terrorist situations at last summer’s Daily Kos conference, in which several of the Democratic candidates for President brought forth positions which would have been considered madness a decade ago, this kind of public discussion acclimates the culture to ideas previously unthought and unheard and spirals to a further descent into political and historical degeneracy. As Emerson said at the beginning of our arc of power: We see ourselves ascending a stairs. But today we see ourselves descending that same set of stairs.

Torture now has binary parts; those sort of for and those sort of against – this sort of pseudo-Hegelian dialectic has mnemonic and associative conversational features which acclimate the reader to torture and insinuates torture into our culture to a degree to which it has never existed before. It is a complete compromise of character by the appeasing voice of the horde, today's mainstream journalists.

Arthur Koestler - spirit father of the neocon adventure - referred to torturers in his time - the children of Franco - as the scum of the earth and it is interesting that the neocon journalists who were formed by Koestler's heroic character in opposition to European fascism first advanced this discussion. But in Koestler's time, the torturers were them; The Others. They were not those among us nor were they part of our discussion and we did not consider them to be part of our humanity: We defined our humanity in opposition to them. They were the grotesque caricatures in Dostoyevsky's The Grand Inquisitor and Kafka's In the Penal Colony; a different moral species than the rest of us. Today, as per the discussion in the NYTs, they are us. That this discussion exists at all today is evidence that the American republic as it was born and reared has lost its talisman.

It is startling that the appeasers in the press only accommodate to a new force in Congress which insults 2,000 years of the European tradition and religious history and on the day of Christmas at that. As torture, like the repeal of habeas corpus and the establishment of American gulags, has only entered into the American political realm and discussion since American politicians, like George Bush and Mitt Romney, have promoted themselves as Christian. Romney, in fact, the most fascistic of the lot, has promised us that he is also - Mormonism aside - the most Christian of this squalid pack of hungry predators and in his extreme positions on torture and Gitmo he appears to want to bolster his Christian karma and credentials. As Ron Paul said recently, disarming a Fox commentator who hoped to initiate him into the Fox tribe: "Upton Sinclair once wrote that when America became a fascist state it would do so wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross."

To discuss freedom is to be free. Likewise, to discuss torture as the NYTs does today is to enter the moral condition of the true slave; the one who prefers moral submission to clarity of heart and mind; the one who has not the courage to stand free in opposition; the one who enters the discussion in objectivity; the coward who channels irony as a substitute for passion and holds on head down through the difficult years lest s/he lose tenure and the pension.

This is Corporation Man and Woman in a Republic of Penguins – the totem animal of the horde; uniform in mind and stripe, walking together into the sunset without the political will or individual character to take the real actions that need to be taken - s/he is the weakling who enables the Wolf and the Rising American Fascism.

The congenial tone and banter in the NYTs discussion finds the voice of Huxley's lightly totalitarianated hordes - people without places marinated exclusively in their generational culture and with tiny telephones the size of roaches dangling from their ears, willfully on the path of Prozac and public radio. If penguins listened to us, this would be the language they listened in. And if penguins could speak, this would be their language and discussion as well.

The Year of the Penguin: The Grand Inquisitor at The New York Times

draft

The NYTs and other major newspapers have opened on their op-ed pages a congenial and brotherly discussion of torture. Torture now has binary parts; those sort of for and those sort of against - this is a sort of Hegelian dialectic which insures the establishment of torture in one realm or another and to a degree to which it has never existed in our republic before. It is a complete compromise of character by the weakling, cowardly and appeasing voice of the horde, today's mainstream journalists. Arthur Koestler - spirit father of the neocon adventure - referred to torturers in his time - the children of Franco - as the scum of the earth and it is interesting that the neocon journalists who were formed by Koestler's heroic character in opposition to European fascism first advanced this discussion. But in Koestler's time, the torturers were them; The Others. They were not those among us and we did not consider them to be part of our humanity: We defined our humanity in opposition to them and their very existence as if they were a different moral species. Today, as per the discussion in the NYTs, it is us. That this discussion exists at all today is evidence that the American republic as it was born and reared has lost its talisman.

It is startling that the appeasers in the press only accommodate to a new force in Congress which insults 2,000 years of the European tradition and religious history and on the day of Christmas at that. As torture, like the repeal of habeas corpus and the establishment of American gulags, has only entered into the American political realm and discussion since American politicians, like George Bush and Mitt Romney, have promoted themselves as Christian. Romney, in fact, the most fascistic of the lot, has promised us that he is also - Mormonism aside - the most Christian of this squalid pack of hungry wolves and in his extreme positions on torture and Gitmo he appears to want to bolster his Christian karma.

To discuss Freedom is to Be Free. Likewise, to discuss torture as the NYTs and the Republican candidates all but McCain and Ron Paul do today, is to enter the moral condition of the true slave; the one who prefers moral submission to clarity of heart and mind; the one who has not the courage to stand free in opposition; the one who enters the discussion in objectivity; the coward who lacks passion and holds on head down through these difficult years lest s/he lose the pension. This is Corporation Man and Woman in a Republic of Penguins; s/he is the weakling who enables the Wolf and the Rising American Fascism. And in our time today it is only Ron Paul and John McCain who speak with that clear voice in opposition and without nuance or discussion. As Paul said very recently on Fox TV, disarming their commentator who hoped to accommodate him as a fledgling into their tribe: "Upton Sinclair once wrote that when American became a fascist state it would do so wrapped in the American flag and carrying a cross."

America is an Awakening land, an Enlightenment culture and the Land of the Free. One day we will again be a slave culture perhaps in the mind and in the heart, beholding to priest, the brute and the politician alike, as everything awake returns to sleep. But not today. Those who bring up the topic of torture for discussion will soon descend to the Hole of Shame and Nothingness from which they have come sputtering forth. Consider that their life force was not, never was, can never be, strong enough to get a purchase in the Land of the Free.

George Bush, The Last Penguin: Does California Need a Federal Government? Does New England?

by Bernie Quigley for The Free Market News Network on 12/20/07

In a historic series of government failures – Iraq, Katrina, Gitmo, habeas corpus, waterboarding, the fallen dollar – the EPA’s rejection of states’ emission efforts today will perhaps prove to be the most far-reaching. For the first time since 1865 the states – this time the Northeastern and Western states – face a crisis which sends them to oppose Constitutional convention and possibly Constitutional law to make their own way in the world. We are seeing the beginning of a new regionally-based citizenship. Perhaps we are seeing the end of federalism. Does California still need a federal government? Does New England?

In the case of California, the question should be can California survive a federal government? Ask yourself, if you were an internal country with its own unique culture and with an economy the size of France and an outside force kept reaching in to take your kids from your family and press them into military service (or national service); if it’s shamanic economic theories and actions virtually killed your housing market and sent a recovering but healthy state economy deep into debt; if its head-in-the-sand environmental policies formed and fulfilled by oil and auto lobbyists and a very few Texas oil families in cahoots with Saudi princes turned the bottom part of your state into an uninhabitable fire and dust zone, annually causing death now going into the hundreds and into the thousands, at one point you would have to ask yourself, what are my options?

At the beginning of the war on Iraq I wrote here that the country, state by state and region by region, had one choice and that choice was: Do we want to join the rest of the world; a world we created in law and in outlook since Yalta, or do we want to join the Crawford Ranch? We face the same question today.

In California, attitudes reached consensus in the second election of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger when he won the most liberal precincts in San Francisco and some of the most conservative in the state. In a landmark speech a few months back Schwarzenegger showed commitment we have not seen in our national people in his efforts to bring a cleaner environment to California. It was a prescient moment in which he said that green business and a thoughtful approach to the world around us would be the way of the future and everyone will get on board, all but “the last penguin” floating off by itself on a tiny scrap of iceberg.

It was a good metaphor; we live in a moment when animal familiars are all the rage, in movies like The Golden Compass. Surely the penguin is the totem animal for an entire generation; a horde, uniform in mind and stripe, walking together into the sunset without the political will or individual character to take the actions that need to be taken. And substituting instead the switching off of an occasion light switch or conspicuously wearing a sweater around the office. The sweater was the new initiative at Bali – I expect to see Bush the Little wearing one soon. These are denial initiatives; they remove the individual from responsibility by creating the personal illusion of “doing something.” But they are at least prelude to an environment of real action in the next generation (the non-penguin or “anti-penguin” generation), which is the new one rising.

One of Governor Schwarzenegger’s initiatives is a “hydrogen highway,” a pioneering set of way stations leading up from southern California to Sacramento north to Vancouver, so that hydrogen-fueled cars, which emit no harmful waste and can be fueled by power generated from algae farms or nuclear plants, can be driven the length. Here in the Northeast the initiative exists to continue the path from this end, much as the railroad was started at both ends and united at the middle two centuries back. It would begin in Montpelier, VT, and on to Burlington. And Quebec and the Canadian provinces in between also have the political will to post stations around Montreal and across the TransCanada highway, linking up with the California initiative in Vancouver.

So what stops this? It is the god which the visionary Aldous Huxley called Ford. Like most, it is a god with a dual nature; Ford and General Motors and as it was said at the beginning, “as goes General Motors, so goes the country.” Which has an ominous ring today.

Like so many of that century with their horde waves of futurism, fascism, communism, consumerism, deconstructivism and reconstructivism, it is a god that failed.

The tailpipe standards California adopted in 2004 oppose the car lobby and the Bush oil family and its adjutant, Dick Cheney, the Dark Penguin. It would force automakers to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 30 percent by 2016. But under the Clean Air Act, CA needs a federal waiver to implement.

Note the language: Clean Air Act; a federal program committed to keeping the air dirty. It is the fate of all Twins that they look like, no matter how different they are. This is the language of the U.S.S.R. in the old Politburo days and the sound and syllogism which the Dark Penguin speaks today; the language that Huxley's lightly totalitarianated hordes - people without places marinated exclusively in their generational culture and with tiny telephones the size of roaches dangling from their ears, willfully on the path of Prozac and public radio - listen in. And if penguins could speak, it would be their language as well. Likewise, when the EPA rejected the advanced standards brought forth by Schwarzenegger, as in the Soviet tradition, it set up its own program; a program which brought forth actually laughter and booing at the recent climate conference in Bali.

But Arnold is not alone. 12 other states – most in the Northeast but a few in the Southwest and Pacific Northwest – are on board with him. And so is Canada and so is Europe and much of Asia and most of the world. All of those other states are now prevented from going forward by the feds.

The question for them – for us – is as it was at the beginning of the war on Iraq; do we want to join Boy George at the Crawford Ranch or do we want to join the world? But today the circumstances are different and so is the country: today we go forward with Arnold.

Bloomberg, McCain, Schwarzenegger: Waiting for Arnold, Part Four

By Bernie Quigley for The Free Market News Network on 12/19/07

Speculation is high this week that Mike Bloomberg, Mayor of New York, will announce that he will run for President as a third party candidate. David A. Andelman, who worked for Bloomberg, wrote this week in Forbes.com that this time it is for real.

“Folks close to New York City's twice-elected mayor suggest that he's made up his mind to end one of the city's long-running rumors and become an Independent candidate for President,” writes Andelman.

He says he will announce shortly after Feb. 5, directly after Super Tuesday when he would have a pretty good idea of just who would be lining up against his third-party, self-financed billion-dollar campaign. Bloomberg has said that he would put two billion into his campaign.

Who would Bloomberg chose for his Vice President? Quite possibly John McCain.

From the beginning of these rumors which started two years ago, Bloomberg’s gamble can be viewed as playing between two characters: Hillary Clinton and John McCain. First speculation was that Bloomberg would run if party politics became polarized between Senator Clinton on the one hand and George Allen, former Senator of Virginia, slightly to the right of Genghis Khan, on the other. When Allen fell to Jim Webb in ‘06, Bloomberg held on, waiting to see if mischief would develop along the path to ‘08.

And mischief it is, in local and national races. Mischief here, mischief there, mischief everywhere. The Land of the Free in our time is being offered professional wrestlers, TV actors, Appalachian preachers, stand up comedians, strippers, favorite sons and their cousins, aunties, wives and secretaries.

The political commercial that Chuck Norris has done with Mike Huckabee is a hoot. Huckabee is now leading in Iowa and in parts of the South. But this is President of the United States. Huckabee’s article in Foreign Affairs this month may bring to the action and passion of war in Iraq the native sweetness of the Bible Belt man of faith, but the prognostication is in some ways more extreme than any yet conceived even by the Yankee-reared, pseudo-Texan today in the White House. It delivers a sensory feeling which might be called Fascism with a Christian face. If we want out-right fascism, we should go with Rudy. And we might.

Thus, Bloomberg. Hillary is in, and the quiet voices in the parlor long said that if Hillary got the nomination, Bloomberg would consider. And now McCain is out; sent away by the voters in Iowa as straight and narrow as corn rows, and the South as well, where Huckabee’s rustic charm, Bible quotin’ and guitar strummin’ is taking the day.

Bloomberg is passionate about Israel and there is some dark and complex speculation that he is entering the race to pull the Jewish vote from the Democrats as Hillary or Obama cannot be trusted to stay the current course or design a suitable new one. A liberal on social issues and more actual New Yorker than the Clintons, Bloomberg would pull votes from the Clinton nostalgicos in effect, pushing the electorate to a Republican victory, most likely Giuliani. Said speculation claims that Bloomberg can’t win but he can throw the election to the Republicans and can stay the course for Israel.

However, his personal history says that if he can’t win, he won’t run. And his views on Israel are more real world and accommodating than those of the neocons. And passionate he may be, but not beholding. Bloomberg is a New England Jew raised at a time when New England was tribal, as in the movie Miller’s Crossing. It all ended quickly in the early Sixties, but just prior to that Irish Catholics, Jews and other ethnic groups all interacted more or less within their own kith and kin. It might have been a time when everyone knew their place, but everyone had a place. And Yankee fair play with its humane good sense and Constitutional bearings had a place as well. It did not so much conflict as enhance. Irish Catholics may have married within their parish. We ate fish on Friday, but on Saturday it was beans, the ritual practice of the Yankee tradition. It was a day that had its flaws and problems but torture was not one of them. Bloomberg will make his announcement shortly after a likely New England win at the Super Bowl in an era of renaissance of many things New England.

And by entering in February, Bloomberg will not have been diminished, dominated, territorialized, shaped and formed by Sister Mary Wolf Blitzer and chorus and the very, very few who package and crate the candidates, even flaunting press dominance and candidates submission by asking them to “raise their hands” like school children. In this he stands alone, above the other candidates, above the press and above the Iowa horde which shifts its shape like amber waves of grain. Among the mainstream candidates the most telling moment in the debates was John McCain’s amazement that the other candidates – Ron Paul aside – see nothing wrong with torture in its current use. Our local paper here in the mountains of New Hampshire has made the point in an editorial that any candidate which advocates torture should be discarded out of hand. That speaks to the New Englander in us; Jew, Irish or White Glove Unitarian. Bloomberg’s choice of McCain for VP would retrieve that lost honor.

It should be remembered that it was Bloomberg who put the cash behind Joe Lieberman in his contentious reelection bid against Ned Lamont. And as coincidence would have it, Lieberman just this week endorsed John McCain.

There is, they say, no such thing as a coincidence. So there could be something behind it that this week, when Adam Lisberg of The New York Daily News interviewed Bloomberg, there was a lot of good talk about John McCain.

Elizabeth Benajmin of the DN reports: “Asked for his thoughts on the party-line-crossing endorsement of John McCain by Sen. Joe Lieberman (whom Bloomberg himself crossed party lines to endorse last year back when the mayor was a Republican and Lieberman had lost the Democratic primary), Bloomberg called the development ‘healthy,’ adding:

‘Number one, in all fairness and disclosure, (McCain) campaigned for me. Somebody introduced us before ‘01, and we were just casual friends. And then when I started to run for office, he came up and we walked the streets of Brooklyn. So, I can say nothing but good things about John McCain for that reason.’

John McCain can become here Bloomberg’s Gray Champion, and if the Republicans prefer the Singin’ Preacher or the Mormon who assures us he loves Jesus good as Johnny Cash, although the rituals these guys propose suggest the Spanish Inquisition, Bloomberg will take him as Vice President.

Bloomberg’s third party move is a gamble he is unlikely to take unless there is a good chance of success. And it could in fact resemble more the corporate takeover of a Republican Party fallen into poor management practices which have undervalued its stock more than a random third party run like Ross Perot’s; a buy out and a shake up, putting new management at the top and leaving the rest to dangle.

That new top management would indeed include Mayor Mike’s best bud, the Governator of California. Lisberg asked about his friendship with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bloomberg replied:

“Number one, I had dinner with him on Saturday night. And number two, he couldn’t be vice president. The Constitution is clear. You have to be able to be president to be vice president. I don’t know where that story came from, but the law would not allow it. Incidentally, he’s a great guy. He’d make a great vice president…This guy’s a substantive guy who really is serious about governing, and I think California - he’s going to be term-limited out - California’s going to miss him, because he really has made a difference in his term in his office. But Saturday night’s the answer to your question, and I had steak a la stone.”

No, Arnold would be Secretary of State in a Bloomberg Triumvirate. And as VP, McCain would be too old to follow in Bloomberg’s footsteps as POTUS. But a Bloomberg Presidency as successful as Reagan’s or Eisenhower’s – and we are at such a turning; and Bloomberg has the abilities - would give him and Arnold the real possibility of changing the Constitution so foreign-born Arnold could follow in the Presidency by ’12 or ’16, giving the Bloomberg/McCain/Arnold Triumvirate a 16-year run of governance.

We are today in a state of management crisis that finds a parallel in the mid-1800s and the fall of the Whigs. Today, a successful Bloomberg Presidency could well put one of the two existing political parties out of business for good. My guess is that it would be the Democrats who have descended into a Northeastern Clinton Personality Cult and have failed to address the needs of the South, the Southwest and the Midwest as population and economy have shifted to those parts.

The Democrats had in any case lost their purpose when the country lost its proletariat and working class to a varied economy; when ethnic Democrats moved to Reagan and when the Democrats went Lace Curtain and married Wall St. with the Clintons. The Republicans as well lost their way when the talisman of the English-speaking tradition, habeas corpus, was traded in for the Bible and the waterboard.

Ron Paul has opened a new path for the Republicans. Or better, Paul has articulated and clarified a direction the Republicans had only been slouching toward these past 20 years. The Paul phenomenon is certainly the most important new awakening of this Presidential cycle thus far. It will have long-reaching consequences.

Ron Paul could bring in one path. Bloomberg another. And for the Clintons, Hasta La vista, baby.

But would Arnold want the job as one of Bloomberg’s Three Celestial Ones?

I am now from 25 to 30 percent that Arnold, frustrated with a convention-bound American system which seems immune to creativity and rewards incompetence, will look back to Austria where he still has the option of being chief. I used to joke with a German friend that when the euro awakens it will really be a deutschmark. France and Germany are binary parts - the core center of a New Europe; Sarcozy, it should be noted, has Prussian gentry lines and has crossed those lines to marry France with Germany; the euro has pulled 35% from the dollar in its six years of life and the Pope (Latin Mass! Old School!) is a Bavarian. If Arnold went back to Austria today he would bring a mythical dimension to New Europe and the EU and Austria would be its center.

But the other 70% says no. Arnold is as American as apple pie, Glock 9s and hydrogen cars. And in our time and in his way, perhaps no other speaks better to the essence of the American condition. If Bloomberg brings him along, he will go.

New England Should Claim Regional Identity

By Bernie Quigley for The Free Market News Network on 12/11/07

We have come to a crisis in the United States. Habeas corpus, key to the evolution of the English-speaking people since the 12^th century, has been randomly discarded without raising an eyebrow. Waterboarding, a torture technique refined in Nazi Germany, is all in a day’s work and the Washington Post revealed last week that key Democrats, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi, were fully briefed on waterboarding as early as 2002 and registered no protest. And General Abizaid’s assessment that the objectives in the Middle East will require “ . . . 50 years of war,” raised no objection either from an accommodating Congress or from the passive multitudes.

I believe that this crisis has come about because Alexander Hamilton’s vision of federalism has reached its outer limits. Hamilton and Washington believed in a single strong central government and weak states and regions. This may well have been the correct path when the western regions were still in wilderness and while the Northeast dominated the political agenda after 1865. But demographics have changed the political landscape.

The rise of the Religious Right is an organic consequence of changing demographics. Influence in our country has shifted from the New York and Boston regions to the South, Texas, the Southwest and Midwestern states because economy and population have moved there continually since the end of WW II. Naturally, when the South became economically and politically integrated into the world economy and began to gain influence on the national agenda, Southern people would demand that their own values be expressed in their own cultural idiom. And as it has been since the earliest days, these values would be in opposition to those of the Northern regions, particularly those of New England. This, writes the great Southern historian Frank Owsley, has been the “irrepressible conflict” in American destiny long preceding the Civil War.

In Vermont today we see signs which say, “U.S. out of Vermont.” And for the first time since 1812, there are fledgling secession movements in Vermont and New Hampshire.

Secession is not a practical solution. But here in New England today we have to face the fact that we can no longer impose our values on the rest of the United States, particularly the South, the Southwest and a good part of the Midwest. Hamilton’s direction is yielding to demographics, and Jefferson’s vision of unique states and regions and peoples, loosely connecting the one to the other, growing over time, rich in character and each with its own identity and personality is ascending.

New England was in any case Jeffersonian before 1865 as were our earliest poets and visionaries. We were closer to nature and perhaps closer to each other than our “Hamiltonian” neighbors in New York and in the more industrialized regions. I believe we still are Jeffersonian and I believe with Jefferson that the only sure defense against a wayward and unpredictable federal government is strong states and strong regions.

In order to retain our New England character and culture we must return to Jefferson’s vision. But we should return to Jefferson by increment; without causing chaos or disorder. “One size fits all federalism” (a phrase first used here at The Free Market News Network, now used by Romney) was the right path in terms of economy and culture when the western regions were empty spaces. But today, a regional approach to government would be far more effective on issues of work, poverty, economy and environment.

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in California, Governor Jodi Rell of Connecticut and Mike Bloomberg of New York have all recently taken the Jeffersonian approach in opposition to the federal government on issues of environment and gun control. Gov. Schwarzenegger in particular has brought a direct challenge to the federal government, signing climate treaties between California and British Columbia and England in direct opposition to federalist custom and lore since 1865.

This is the natural next step in our American journey.

Op-ed to the Boston Globe, 12/1/07

New England Should Seek Greater Autonomy on National Issues

By Bernie Quigley on 12/11/07

At the beginning of the war on Iraq two writers and a college professor from the three northernmost New England states proposed that under Jefferson’s view of the Constitution, the New England states need not participate. To our surprise, George Kennan, possibly our most important ambassador since Franklin, heartily endorsed this idea. We also suggested that if the U.S. no longer wanted to be part of the UN, then the New England states should send their own representative to the UN. John Kenneth Galbraith, still at his desk at Harvard at 94 in 2002, thought this idea “ . . . wonderfully to the good.”

We have come to a crisis in the United States. Habeas corpus, key to the evolution of the English-speaking people since the 12^th century, has been randomly discarded without raising an eyebrow. Waterboarding, a torture technique refined in Nazi Germany, is all in a day’s work and the Washington Post revealed last week that key Democrats, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi, were fully briefed on waterboarding as early as 2002 and registered no protest. And General Abizaid’s assessment that the objectives in the Middle East will require “ . . . 50 years of war,” raised no objection either from an accommodating Congress or from the passive multitudes.

I believe that this crisis has come about because Alexander Hamilton’s vision of federalism has reached its outer limits. Hamilton and Washington believed in a single strong central government and weak states and regions. This may well have been the correct path when the western regions were still in wilderness and while the Northeast dominated the political agenda after 1865. But demographics have changed the political landscape.

As a result of these new demographics, we in New England can no longer dictate to the rest of the country and today we are being forced to live under the political influence of the heartland religionists and their “faith-based” politics. Increasingly, Boston and New York no longer control the conversation. Texas does.

The rise of the Religious Right is an organic consequence of changing demographics. Influence in our country has shifted from the New York and Boston regions to the South, Texas, the Southwest and Midwestern states because economy and population have moved there continually since the end of WW II. Naturally, when the South became economically and politically integrated into the world economy and began to gain influence on the national agenda, Southern people would demand that their own values be expressed in their own cultural idiom. And as it has been since the earliest days, these values would be in opposition to those of the Northern regions, particularly those of New England. This, writes the great Southern historian Frank Owsley, has been the “Irrepressible Conflict” in American destiny long preceding the Civil War.

It should be noted that in the variety of religious forums and “value forums” sponsored recently by the Religious Right, only John McCain and Ron Paul have explicitly opposed torture. This in no way speaks to New England and New England’s values.

In Vermont today we see signs which say, “U.S. out of Vermont.” And for the first time since 1812, there are fledgling secession movements in Vermont and New Hampshire.

Secession is not the answer. But New England today has to face the fact that we can no longer impose our values on the rest of the United States, particularly the South, the Southwest and a good part of the Midwest. Hamilton’s direction is yielding to demographics, and Jefferson’s vision of unique states and regions and peoples, loosely connecting the one to the other, growing over time, rich in character and each with its own identity and personality is ascending.

New England was in any case Jeffersonian before 1865 as were our earliest poets and visionaries. We were closer to nature and perhaps closer to each other than our “Hamiltonian” neighbors in New York and in the more industrialized regions. I believe we still are Jeffersonian and I believe with Jefferson that the only sure defense against a wayward and unpredictable federal government is strong states and strong regions.

In order to retain our New England character and culture we must return to Jefferson’s vision. But we should return to Jefferson by increment; without causing chaos or disorder. “One size fits all federalism” (my phrase, now used by Romney) was the right path in terms of economy and culture when the western regions were empty spaces. But today, a regional approach to government would be far more effective on issues of work, poverty, economy and environment.

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in California, Governor Jodi Rell of Connecticut and Mike Bloomberg of New York have all recently taken the Jeffersonian approach in opposition to the federal government on issues of environment and gun control. Gov. Schwarzenegger in particular has brought a direct challenge to the federal government, signing climate treaties between California and British Columbia and England in direct opposition to federalist custom and lore since 1865.

This is the natural next step in our American journey.

On the Death of John Lennon

By Bernie Quigley 12/8/07 for The Free Market News Network

John Lennon was gunned down and killed 27 years ago today in New York City. Perhaps the gods take the Great Ones young so they don't end up playing Super Bowls and Bar Mitzvahs and political rallies when their immortal and timeless moment passes and the constellation dissipates.

The anniversary of his death goes largely unnoticed in the press. I think this is probably good at the moment because we live in the hour of the weakling and the wolf; the wolf enabled by the weakling - all original spirits are sent into exile in times like this or leave at their own accord - much as the wave element of matter collapses when it is being watched. (Note on The Way of the Weakling: WaPost reveals today that key Democrats, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi, were fully briefed on waterboarding as early as 2002 and registered no objections. The Post advises that this torture strategy was refined in Nazi Germany. It should also be noted that the rise of fascism in Germany and Italy was fully dependent on the weakling and appeasing liberal cultural of the German and Italian middle class.)

When Lennon is remembered at all today it is as an anti-war figure but that is the way of the weakling as well. Not that Lennon was weak; he never was. But this is the way the artist is appropriated for vain political or nihilistic objectives and there was never a trace of nihilism in Lennon’s life and work. (In the Rolling Stones, perhaps, those suburban titty-bar musicians and Friends of Bill who followed in his shadow as the great ones all carry shadows and tails.)

In 1969, at the peak of the war in Vietnam, John Lennon was the most important man in the world. But that was in the twilight of his arc of creativity. The high point of his life and work was several years before when he used the expression “I am he,” at the beginning of one of his most important and entertaining songs at the height of the hippie days. Lennon was, in his time, a generational shaman. He awakened his own generation between childhood and adulthood. But today he resonates in the world as a pure force all of his own.

Had there been no John Lennon then there would perhaps be no Dalai Lama now, for in his journey to the East in his life and work he took half the world with him and he took the chill and fright and mystery and fear out of the things of the East. Nor would that Aquarian talisman, the Golden Compass, have been found yet. Possibly there would not have come that later pre-Calvin earth shaman, Harry Potter.

“I am he,” is an expression widely understood in the East – it is in a sense the essence of the East. The classic explanation in the Hindu is that a person alone in the world at some point finds an enlightenment within herself or himself; a celestial inner god, the Atman. And if that person continues on the path, which in the East would be considered the Path of God, then at the top of the mountain she or he might find wholeness with all the others and wholeness with the universe. For the first the journeyer could think and say, “I am the Atman.” Then at the peak s/he would say, “I am the Brahman.” Lennon played on these phrases in classical Liverpool humor. He followed the Hindu phrase I am he (I am no longer who I was when I started, but I have become something else which is within him and the others and everyone, everything, everywhere . . .) not with “I am the Atman, I am the Brahman,” but instead with: I am the Eggman, I am the Walrus.

Listening to Senators, Governors, Presidents and outright louts and war criminals these past few years and this week again talk about their religious “convictions” – these men of faith and religious burghers who joyfully in the name of the Prince of Peace endorse torture, “50 more years of war,” and barbaric practices unheard of among the English-speaking people since the 12^th century, I began to think of how entirely screwed I would feel today if I was a young man and just beginning on life's journey, hearing these speeches given in the Manhattan penthouses of Wall St. financiers and their lobbyists and ex-Presidents and in the parlors of Texas oil men.

And what a joy and a pleasure it was to hear instead these charmed and encouraging words by John Lennon, when I was a young man, even hearing them for the first time in a war zone in Asia.

Lennon’s swan song, Imagine, reflects timeless Buddhist sentiment like that presented in What the Buddha Taught by Walpola Rahula, which had gained popularity in the Sixties. It is likely an intentional reconstruction of Tolstoyan philosophy which was deeply influenced by Buddhism and Taoism.

Imagine also bears a relationship to The Gospel of Thomas, which he quoted from in earlier music ("When the inside is out . . . the outside is in . . ."). Elaine Pagel's book Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas, states that in Thomas’s account, Jesus challenges those who mistake the kingdom of God for an otherworldly place or a future event: Jesus said, "If those who lead you say to you, Look, the kingdom is in the sky,’ then the birds of the sky will get there before you . . ." In a word, Imagine there’s no heaven.

William Butler Yeats writes: "What portion in the world can the artist have/Who has awakened from the common dream/But dissipation and despair?" Such was the lot of John Lennon.

Late in life, broken and in pain, Lennon wrote, "I was the Walrus, but now I’m John."

One of his biographers writes that he was never happy again after the Sgt. Peppers period. The pictures show it. He never smiled again for the camera after he returned from India.

From Quigley in Exile, repeated on the 27th anniversary of his death

On the 25th Anniversary of His Death:
Free as a Bird: John Lennon's Unfinished Journey

"Is it not written in your law . . . you are gods?" John 10:34

"The crosses are all full," said the lay brother.
"Then we must make another cross. If we do not make an end of him another will, for who can eat and sleep in peace while men like him are going about the world?" - "The Crucifixion of the Outcast," Celtic tale retold by William Butler Yeats in Mythologies

"Zen demands intelligence and will-power, as do all the greater things which desire to become real." These are the words of C. G. Jung in the introduction to D.T. Suzuki’s An Introduction to Zen Buddhism. Jung’s words and observations would win him a place top row center, right next to Edgar Allen Poe, on the cover of Sgt. Peppers. In the 1950s Suzuki was always referred to as Dr. Suzuki – much as Richard Gere is referred to as only Richard today by Tibetan Buddhists. It is kind of an honorarium, a title. Dr. Suzuki was a solid forefather on the path East and one of the very first learned Masters to come from the East to the West.

In the 1950s he taught at Columbia University and was a celebrity in New York City, an exotic but common monk with a great smile and a pure vision of Zen. Personal experience is everything in Zen, said Dr. Suzuki. No ideas are intelligible to those who have no backing in experience. Mystification is far from being the object of Zen itself, but to those who have not touched the central fact of life Zen inevitable appears as mystifying. Penetrate through the conceptual superstructure and what is imagined to be a mystification will at once disappear, and at the same time there will be an enlightenment known as satori.

Dr. Suzuki talked straight: personal experience is everything in Zen. The purpose of life is love. I’m not sure if John Lennon read these words but perhaps his wife, Yoko Ono, did. She was a key figure in the avant garde art scene in New York City at the time and had been in New York for a long time, even as a student at Sarah Lawrence. She was well known as a conceptual artist before she met John Lennon, and lived and worked in the same realm as people like John Cage and Marcel Duchamp. These would be the first people in New York to listen to Dr. Suzuki.

The art students were always the first to catch on, and John Lennon and his friend Stu Sutcliffe were the art students who started The Beatles. They were like pilot fish for the rest of us who were born at the end of the war and it was quite a large school of fish. 40 million people. All our fathers had been warriors. We were all the same age and born within months of one another, conceived by men who had been a long time without women, directly on return from war in Asia and Europe.

For us it was a bristling, exciting respite between childhood and adulthood and we were interested in new things. There were no teachers around to deflect our learning, no priests to lead us astray. For the briefest period, all of the shields were down. Other voices would come shortly. Swami Yogananda, who wrote The Autobiography of a Yogi, would become very popular for awhile. John said he read about half of it, which I thought was pretty good, as I’d only managed about 80 pages. Later, the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and Tolstoy. But Suzuki’s message entered the river of our generation at the same time as John entered our river. At first much of the Zen around New York was dark, misunderstood in the West as nihilism, the shadow which withered the Western heart after 500 years of exploration and dominance. But John and Stu understood Dr. Suzuki’s Zen message that love is the purpose of life.

John is said to have started The Beatles to have something to do with Stu. When McCartney entered the group he drove them to become more serious and businesslike. But at first it was always John and Stu. Stu had the artist’s eye for style – naming the group The Beatles after seeing Lee Marvin and Marlon Brando in The Wild Ones. Lee Marvin’s motorcycle gang was called The Beetles. Stu always attracted the coolest people as well. And when they went to Berlin before the group was fully formed he attracted the beautiful photographer Astrid Kirchherr, who would become an anima figure – a muse – to the group and open them up in the mind in new ways and awaken new music and images.

An avante garde photographer in Germany, she and her friends, including Klaus Voorman, traveled in the seedy night scene in Berlin and met the group there, which was still going under the name of The Silver Beatles. She gave them the playful Beatles haircuts. Friendship would bind them. Stu married Astrid and Klaus later drew the cover picture for the Revolver album, and much later, after The Beatles had broken up, he played as a background musician on the Imagine album.

Personal experience would guide the fledgling poet as well, and like many ordinary men before him, Lennon became great when someone he loved died. He would remember them all. And he would remember Stu, who never returned to England with them.

I know I’ll always feel affection, for people and things that went before. I know I’ll always think about them.

But it was different with Stu.

In my life, I loved you more.

This requiem, this love song, is considered today to be one of the greatest songs ever written. It is the beginning of the artist’s journey for John Lennon.

The Sixties was a cacophony of a million sounds and smells and voices and music and colors and textures, but especially music. The electric guitar was like a key; an ancient iron ornamented key to a mediaeval dream door that would open to an age.

Every age, be it short or long, has a beginning, a middle and an end, like a person’s life, and this age was no exception. This age, someone pointed out, came with its own sound track. And it rose and fell rather quickly.

At the center was The Beatles and the Sixties rose and fell with the fate of the Beatles. And at dead center, the man in the center of the Beatles was John Lennon.

From beginning to end The Beatles was about John Lennon. He was not the most important innovator or instigator of the period, except perhaps in music, but the music would eventually become secondary to his life, as literature had become secondary to Tolstoy.

He was one of us, common and working class, but of course, more gifted. And the transformation he made, we made. Eventually he left The Beatles behind to complete the passage himself. He was the Man at the Center who made passage with us and for us and completed the journey on our behalf. And I don’t think we could have or would have completed passage without him.

The remaining Beatles say they were transformed by Bob Dylan like the rest of us were. John was as well. It shows in his pictures. It shows in his clothes and in music like Norwegian Wood, a folksy, spare song inspired by the folk scene, written when the Beatles would begin to rise to a higher artistic level. John, they say, wanted to conquer the world, which The Beatles did with ease. Then, when they heard Bob Dylan, they aspired to be artists.

Dylan opened the gate and performed the Rite of Entry to the age with his soulful cohort Joan Baez, and the age rose to the center when The Beatles reached their artistic apex. Then followed the rite of exit with Joni Mitchell and the howling animal cries of Neil Young, mourning the passing of the brief and sacred moment.

The Beatles, at the top of their creative arc -- that would be somewhere within the Sgt. Peppers area -- brought the defining moment to a generation. Some 30 years later, in January, 2001, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd contrasted the generation with George Bush, Jr., who last week threatened to cast the first veto of this presidency to overthrow Congress’s attempt to ban his policy of allowing the torture of military prisoners.

In his first month in office she wrote, “He said he never liked the Beatles after they got into that ‘kind of a weird psychedelic period.’” One either crossed the river or did not, and those who did not, struggled to create a counter-force. (Ten weeks into his presidency Dowd reported going hungry for a shred of modernity. “Bush II has reeled backward so fast, economically, environmentally, globally, culturally, it’s redolent of Dorothy clicking her way from the shimmering spires of Oz to a depressed black-and-white Kansas,” she lamented. “What’s next? Asbestos, DDT, bomb shelters, filterless cigarettes? Patti Page?”)

Not unlike George Bush, John Lennon was preoccupied with Jesus. You could see it early on with the trouble he got into when the Beatles were first big. Fans would crowd them and overwhelm them and once John said to a crowd of reporters, “We’re more popular than Jesus.” There was no arrogance to it, but subtle awareness. The Beatles were more popular than Jesus. Yet Bush and Lennon couldn’t be more far apart in their quests.

In The Tao of Jung, psychiatrist and Jung scholar David H. Rosen discusses C.G. Jung’s decent into the shadowy world of the collective unconscious, the world beyond the conscious ego. On the way into the “cave” of the unconscious stood a dwarf with a leathery skin, as if he were mummified, which Jung squeezed past. Rosen explains this in terms of Indian mythology: “Shiva steps on a dwarf that represents the ego when this deity does its creative dance of death and rebirth.”

Likewise with the Beatles. When they began their real creative work, they left behind the casings of their early ego identity, pictured as four mop-top wax dummies in early Beatles suits at what appears to be a burial on the cover of the Sgt. Peppers album, while the “new” Beatles appeared above like butterflies just left the cocoon in brightly colored satins and playful epaulets.

At the building vortex of their work, John went through a classic shaman’s arc, the same as the one described by Dante in The Divine Comedy; the same ascribed to Jesus by his followers thus, “. . .he descended into hell the third day . . . . he ascended into heaven.” (As E.C. Krupp writes that Santa Claus, an archaic remnant of a Norse shaman, enters the subtle realms of the archetypal shamanic journey by descending the chimney to the Underworld and flying through the Cosmic Heavens with magical reindeer.)

This is the classic pattern of the journey of the shaman described by anthropologists and it occurred with John as the Beatles rose to the top of their creative arc. IN this kind of psychological transformation, the man or woman who is about to enter into Unconscious falls, out of nowhere and against his or her will, into a funk. He falls into a torpor, a sickness of the mind and heart and feels a worthlessness to his life. He goes through a period of spiritual death and descends deep into the earth. Afterwards, he ascends and rises into heaven. Finally he emerges transfigured and enlightened god king, leaves the celestial place and comes out, usually down from a mountain, with a simple transforming idea for the tribe, a gift from the Land of the Dead.

Lennon went through such a transformation, falling into a psychological funk and getting fat and afraid at the peak of the Beatles initial popularity (“Help,” he sang. “I’m a loser, and I’m not what I appear to be.”) Then at the Revolver album, something new began to happen. Suddenly there is a sense of entering the river, an image which occurs in dreams at times of birth or death (“turn off your mind, relax and float downstream,”) and at times of psychological transformation. In Buddhism and Taoism, it is the sign of a new awakening.

He sang a second song on the same album about floating downstream in a transcendent, blissful sleep, while everyone thinks he is just lazy, (but “I don’t mind,” he sings, “I think they’re crazy”). Some say I’m Only Sleeping is aesthetically the best song he ever composed.

In terms of anthropology, this is the first orientation of an earth shaman finding his feet in the Underworld – the creative unconscious – the world under the earth, where he will take you down with him into the density of the earth, but this is the Subtle Realm of the earth, the Underworld, where “nothing is real” in Strawberry Fields.

And there he finds clarity and confidence, but in a new world, the world of the Unconscious where there is understanding of all you see with eyes closed, and the old world becomes a shell, a mere caricature of psychic life.

The shaman then ascends out of the earth and into the sky, like Jesus rising out of the tomb and entering heaven. John and the Beatles rise then to the very height of their work in Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band. And here at their best work is the shaman’s archetypal journey to the heavens in Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. Like the Underworld of Strawberry Fields, the Astral Heavens also have otherworldly features, like newspaper taxies and magical rivers with tangerine trees and marmalade skies (like the tree “showered with reddish blossoms” blazed in light, a cosmic vision Jung had – a “vision of unearthly beauty” which oddly enough, took place in Liverpool, home of the Fab Four. Lennon’s dream vision in Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds also echo’s Dante’s, looking upon the stars from above, in Paradise: “I saw light in the shape of a river/Flashing golden between two banks/Tinted in colors of marvelous spring./Out of the stream came living sparks/Which settled on the flowers on every side/Like rubies ringed with gold . . .”).

At the peak, John wrote a song called I am the Walrus in which he invoked the Upanishads, which along with The Autobiography of a Yogi was very popular back in those days. John wrote, “I am he,” about the swimming together of all of us at the peak of the Sixties, and “we are all together.” “I am the Eggman,” he sang, with his characteristic Liverpool humor, “. . . they are the Eggmen. I am the Walrus.”

Lennon’s favorite book was Alice in Wonderland and the Abbey Road album contained a snippet of Lewis Carroll's prose. He may have drawn on Lewis Carroll’s wise Walrus, who would fit right in on Sgt. Peppers, holding forth on cabbages and kings to a horde of oysters.

It is all comic and hidden, but it reflects an awareness he had about being a man at the center of a world in transformation. The words, “I am he,” are from the core of Eastern spirituality and are well known to its practitioners. Shimon Malin’s recent book Nature Loves to Hide: Quantum Physics and Reality, a Western Perspective offers an explanation from science: He writes, “Erwin Schrödinger had the experience of finding the soul of the universe within himself, as his own ultimate identity. He expressed his finding as follows: Inconceivable as it seems to ordinary reason, you – and all other conscious beings as such – are all in all. Hence this life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of the entire existence, but is, in a certain sense, the whole; only this whole is not so constituted that it can be surveyed in one single glance. This, as we know, is what the Brahmins express in the sacred, mystic formula which is yet really so simple and so clear: Tat twam asi, this is you [or I am he or this is that]. Or, again, in such words as ‘I am in the east and in the west, I am above and below, I am this whole world’.”

Malin writes that Wolfgang Pauli, when asked if he believed in a personal God, responded with an answer that suggests a mandala: “May I rephrase your question? I myself should prefer the following formulation: Can you, or anyone else, reach the central order of things or events, whose existence seems beyond doubt, as directly as you can reach the soul of another human being? I am using the term “soul” quite deliberately so as not to be misunderstood. If you put your question like that, I would say yes.”

This expression reflects the sentiment of the Upanishads in which the Atman (the Eggman) or the individual soul, finds itself at one with another individual soul, then another, then the whole soul, the world soul, the God consciousness, the Brahmin (the Walrus). It is what Jesus had become after he had gone through the Transfiguration, referring to himself as at one with the God force, at One with the Father. This is the Brahma consciousness.

The Beatles were at their peak with Sergeant Peppers. There John would find fulfillment, anthropologically speaking. Then he would journey to the East, although Paul and Ringo were bored, and find the mystic Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, a father figure to him, but a Great Father, a spiritual father, not an earthly father.

The shaman’s work is essentially over by then, except to bring the gift idea to the community. The shaman has brought the tribe with him through the transformation of the Unconscious. It is up to us after that.

Yet some of the Beatles greatest work would come as they traveled down the back side of the mountain. The White Album is still a favorite to fans. One song, I’m So Tired, wonderfully reflects the rite of exit of the exhausted artist that comes at the end of the transformational passage, balancing the liberating I’m Only Sleeping, at the rite of entry.

It is characteristic of the dark side of the passage that the archetypes reverse themselves and show themselves not as they are in the holistic form of the inner life, but just the opposite, shattered in the outside world, reflecting that the center has been passed through and we have once again entered the flat consciousness of the everyday world. And in this instance, it was a hostile world at war in Vietnam and on the streets and campuses of the United States (“Happiness is a warm gun,” sang John)

“Can one live with a shattered glass?” the guru classically asks a Tibetan monk who has just found Enlightenment.

And here – classically - the Beatles reject their psychological god-king, the Maharishi, and even publicly denounce him. Here John sings, “My mother is of the sky.” Lucy is of the sky, his anima, his female counterpart whom he found in transcendent journey. Mother is of the earth. And the tricksters continue their playful treachery, fooling their audience and keeping them off guard with pranks like this one: “ . . . here’s another clue for you all. The Walrus was Paul.”

The Walrus, of course, was John.

Coming off the backside of the mountain – and on return form India - John sometimes believed he was carrying – channeling, we say – Jesus and said so to the Beatles. And he made occasional references, even paraphrasing the Gospel of Thomas “. . . the inside is out/the outside is in. . .” on the White Album.

The full text is, “Jesus said to them:/When you make the two one,/and make the inside like the outside,/and the outside like the inside,/and the upper side like the under side,/and (in such a way) that you make the man/(with) the woman a single one,/in order that the man is not man and the/woman is not woman; when you make eyes in place of an eye,/and a hand in place of a hand,/and a foot in place of a foot,/an image in place of an image;/then you will go into [the kingdom].” – from The Gospel of Thomas.

This preoccupation with Jesus appears again and again. “Christ, you know it ain’t easy,” he sang in one of his last songs, suggesting in The Ballad of John and Yoko that he, like Jesus, would be crucified.

Certainly Lennon made himself look like Jesus at the end of the Beatles. On their last album cover, Abbey Road, he is dressed all in white, like Jesus after the Transfiguration, with the Beatles trailing him across the road, like the Three Celestial Ones (see this blog in January, 2006 for the Three Celestial Ones), following in his wake. (And cultism would abound in the Beatle myth. The old Catholic myth about the three secrets revealed to the children at Fatima by the Blessed Mother took a pernicious turn into hippie lore in the late 1990s when the Pope revealed the third secret to be about a “man in white” who would be gunned down when he returned from the mountain top. The Pope, who had been wounded in an attack at the same time that Lennon was murdered, revealed the contents of the letter to the public because he said the prophecy had been fulfilled. John Paul II, who wore white garments at public ceremonies, claimed to be the man identified in the prophecy.)

Even later, at the very end of his life Jesus is suggested. All through the most creative period, the shaman’s journey from Sgt. Peppers to the end of Abbey Road, John wore a special flowered talisman around his neck. Afterwards, he stopped wearing it. But in New York, in one of the later pictures ever taken of him, a well-known photograph where he is wearing a t-shirt that says New York City across the front, there is a tiny cross hanging from his neck.

At the end of the Beatles period John continued in a prophet’s journey. Like Moses and the Bodhisattva, he returns from a celestial vision on top of the mountain with a simple transforming idea, as Moses did with the tablets.

It is the same idea that has occurred throughout the century but is new to our century here in the West. It is Emerson’s message and here it is again expressed ten years before the Beatles by C.G. Jung: “Our world has shrunk, and it is dawning on us that humanity is one, with one psyche. Humanity is a not inconsiderable virtue which should prompt Christians, for the sake of charity – the greatest of all virtues – to set a good example and acknowledge that though there is only one truth it speaks in many tongues, and that if we still cannot see this it is simply due to lack of understanding. No one is so godlike that he alone knows the true word.” As Woodstock guru Satchidananda put it, “One truth, many paths.”

It is the same idea that Leo Tolstoy, a Great Father figure to the non-violence movement of the Sixties, had brought to the world after his night of the dark soul when he went through a religious transformation.

Lennon, with his wife Yoko Ono, entered the peace movement when he left the Beatles, and like Tolstoy later in life, attempted to apply his natural gifts didactically to public purpose. He is said to have been reading Tolstoy’s late non-fiction work on religion and non-violence as many were in the late 1960s, and his final word, the simple transforming idea he brought down from the mountain is precisely the same thought as Tolstoy’s: Imagine there’s no country, it isn’t hard to do. . . Imagine all the people living life in peace.

Tolstoy claimed that there was one singular thought in Christ’s work and that was do not return violence with violence. On this he built the doctrine that would inspire Ghandi and Martin Luther King, Jr. and the anti-war activists of the 1960s. Furthermore, in Patriotism and Government, Tolstoy wrote that patriotism was a practicable solution for nations early in their development, but it was time now to abandon national prejudices. Even Ghandi, who he corresponded with and who admired Tolstoy enormously, had failed in this, he said. The non-violent approach was the right approach, but, said Tolstoy, declaring the nation to be Hindu, “ruins everything.”

It was time for the removal of all barriers. No country, and no religion, too. This would be Lennon’s final impression on the people: Imagine there’s no heaven, it’s easy if you can, no hell below us, a brotherhood of man.

This is precisely Tolstoy’s religious conviction at the end of his life. He advocated abandoning identity with a particular prophet as one would abandon nationalism.

In one of his last writings on the subject Tolstoy clearly states his opinion: “Attributing a prophetic mission peculiar to certain beings such as Moses, Christ, Krishna, Buddha, Muhammad, Haha’u’llah as well as several others is one of the major causes of division and hatred between men.”

John’s swan song, Imagine, reflects timeless Buddhist sentiment like that presented in What the Buddha Taught by Walpola Rahula, which had gained popularity in the Sixties. And is likely an intentional reconstruction of Tolstoyan philosophy which was deeply influenced by Buddhism and Taoism. Intended or not, it completes the shaman’s journey and begins the transformation of the group.

Imagine also bears a relationship to The Gospel of Thomas. Elaine Pagel's book Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas, states that in Thomas’s account, Jesus challenges those who mistake the kingdom of God for an otherworldly place or a future event: Jesus said, “If those who lead you say to you, Look, the kingdom is in the sky,’ then the birds of the sky will get there before you . . .” In a word, Imagine there’s no heaven.

William Butler Yeats writes: “What portion in the world can the artist have/Who has awakened from the common dream/But dissipation and despair?” Such was the lot of John Lennon.

Late in life, broken and in pain, he wrote, “I was the Walrus, but now I’m John.”

One of his biographers writes that he was never happy again after the Sgt. Peppers period. The pictures show it. He never smiled again for the camera after he returned from India.