Note to DKos: Kathleen Sebelius for VP

Kathleen Sebelius, with Mark Warner, was voted a "Governor of one of the five best managed states in the country" a few years ago. On abilities alone - say if it was something real important like sports - Warner and Sebelius would be first pick for POTUS or VP. Some knowlegeable say Warner has turned down the VP post. It should certainly go then to Sebelius but two issues: one, sez we (Obama camp) should be beholding to Clinton for some reason (white people are afraid of her) and bring in one of her agents but alors, this is not the court of Louis Quattorze and here in the Land of the Free we don't behold - we serve with honor and dignity and character if we are so blessed to be selected to do so and yield with grace and humility if we are not and two: we are at the end of the third-generation; the post-war period has run its course - the least among us have reached the top already and tipped it over so we can only go forward as per American Idol, seeking to be saved by just anybody. And in the lexicon of Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, Revenge Demons are the currency and they are chosen in place of and instead of the true and gifted . . . and the vastly competent and able like Sebelius are overlooked and left behind. This, in a word, is the Age of Kali.

Note to DKos: Mudcat Saunders for VA Senate - Mark Warner, Jim Webb, Mudcat Saunders: a Virginia Trifecta

If Obama picks Mark Warner for VP and Novak says Warner has been consulted about this, then the Senate seat Warner is running for in VA would be abandoned. Warner would be the ideal VP to institutionalize the spirit and elan of Obama and bring it 16 years. Mudcat should take over that Senate race. Mudcat would be a great, great Senator for Virginia. He would take the regions with no problem and he also has a kind of folkloric cache in the beltway towns. Underneath the redneck exterior is one of the shrewdest and most able political minds w/ traditional values of country people and the Democratic Party, and he does know how to turn a phrase. Webb, Warner & Mudcat would be a trifecta for Virginia. Do they have that at NASCAR?

Note to DKos: Bob Dylan in Newport, '64, Obama in Iowa, '07

Bob Dylan provided a theme back when with his haunting song about the times, "The Ballad of a Thin Man" in which a character named Mr. Jones, who was presumed to be a Time magazine reporter, was mystified and afraid by the myriad awakenings of the times. Dylan's iconic scorn called bitterly: "You know something is happening, but you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?" But it all ended at Kent State. As Jerry Rubin said, after Kent State, "You couldn't get a girl to type your term papers for you anymore." Hippie went corporate with the death of four students. What happened was in fact a shift from an authentic Bobby Kennedyish empathy and compassion a whole generation of a bunch of white kids felt for poor black people in the Mississippi Delta suffering from hundreds of years of suffering, Jim Crow and slavery and fully without resources, to the idea that we are all oppressed minorities just like those former slaves are - all us us, like, students - even us rich girls at Ivy League school like Hillary. It was absurd and tragic naivety, but Mr. Jones finally found something he could hold on to; a radicalism which appealed to the mediocrity of his readership and his joyless heart: It was Hillary's graduation speech from college and it was featured in Life Magazine. Say goodbye to Bob Dylan, say good bye to Eldridge Cleaver and those dangerous Black Panthers - say goodbye to H. Rap Brown and Malcolm and the Chicago 7 and and those freaky Hare Khrishnas and Jimi Hendrix and Janis and Gracie Slick and the Dead . . . and say goodbye to Buddhist monks in saphron robes lighting themselves on fire in Golden Gate Park to protest the war in Vietnam and the fey and stoned at Haight-Ashbury in the astonishing Summer of Love. The Day in a Life was upon us but the Day in a Life had passed. And Mr. Jones had found his avatar of dissent: Hillary. Such strange times today: I was in South East Asia in the time you mention . . . extremely good duty in northern Thailand - even made the Haight scene on my way to Than san nute (hard to spell). Then just last week I saw a PBS documentary of Joan Baez on the stage in Newport in '64, elegant in a black dress and the most beautiful woman on face of the earth at the time, leaning out over the audience, squinting and asking, "Is Bobby here . . . is Bobby here?" Then Bob Dylan walked up the stairs and sang with her with his wooden guitar . . . we were still in the day of the wooden guitar. And I kept looking hard because I was there someplace too in the audience and here I was again, watching all three of us separate and together on television. Extraordinary because after Iowa this year I received a surprising number of emails from people I had not heard from in 40 years and had expected never to hear from again. They were calling because something happened in Iowa; because it changed again; because something was happening and they didn't know what it is. And they don't, do they, Mr. Jones?

Note to Michael: Quarternities: Julian Lennon's Lucy in the Sky is a Ba Gua

Michael: I thought I would put this here on the three yin and three yang as I can use pictures to illustrate. It is kind of confusing. I don’t recall that anyone has put this together like this before – Campbell, I believe, has written about the Three Men somewhere but I don’t recall it.

In a word, when the three male figures appear in a dream or folk lore it portends EXTRAVERTED possibilities - a plan or a discovery which the person will bring to the world - for the dreamer. When the three female figures appear in a dream if portends INTROVERTED potentials. But dreams are not hard architecture – things come down the river – they are simply standard patterns or universals.

For example, when Abraham is met by Three Visitors – they are often pictured as angels – it is a task that he has ahead. He is sent to build something of a tribal/spiritual nature. Likewise when Jesus is met with the Three Magi. You see this in folk lore all over the place and even in pop culture. (In The X Files, Fox Mulder, the seeker, is advised by the Lone Gunmen who, in one of the last sequences, fill in at Scully’s “alien birth” as the Three Magi.) Charles Dicken’s has a perfect expression of this in his story A Christmas Carol in which Marley is met by three specters in dreams. The ghosts let him change his life in a positive way and begin a new program.

The Three Sisters, on the other hand – an archetypal characterization of the Triple Goddess – always appear to take the dreamer on a journey of inward discovery with no particular use to a tribe or a group. Although later it might be of use, because a group’s avatar may learn cosmic secrets there. Greek’s Three Muses, Germany’s Rhine Maidens, etc. are all characterizations of this. The Three Sisters usually carry a circle disk of some kind or live in water – a chakrum for Xena, Warrior Princess, who in one episode was filmed in triplicate. Here the dreamer is sent to learn the cosmic secrets. An external hero, like Siegfried, is advised not to go there – it will distract from his plan ahead - but Loki, pictured here, has kinship with the Sisters. King Arthur, however, was born of the Three Sisters and his sword – the sword of discrimination which allows the true leader to discern truth and cut away the bullshit – was given to him by the Lady of the Lake; the Lake here, a classic characterization of Psyche. I believe this suggests that Britannia is and always has been a yin culture; a culture emerged from the religion of the Earth Mother – in the very end, Victoria was the Earth Mother incarnate and manifest in and around the world.

So in each grouping it is Three – three male or yang and three female or yin. This forms a circle of opposites, much like the tai chi emblem. But the tai chi has a tiny opposite in each of its two regions. The Three Males can be seen as the standard Quarternity anthropologists talk about, when you add the fourth element, Psyche to it - in the West, Father, Son, Holy Spirit, Mary. Psyche is the element which is “not present” – it is “on the other side.” But it is the Unconscious which informs the Three Males in their world of business. If you look at this as a sphere with two halves, the single woman representing Psyche contains – on the other side - the Three Sisters. This is how we always talk about Quarternity in the West – Seinfeld is a Quaternity, Frasier is a Quaternity and The Wizard of Oz is a Quaternity.

I had never heard of a Female Quaternity before but it seemed apparent in that the Three Sisters form such a pattern just as the Three Celestial Males do. The great history of the Triple Goddess is Robert Graves’ The White Goddess who wrote of Britannia’s mythic Earth Mother tradition. The Christmas holiday descends from the Winter Solstice celebration of the Earth Mother culture and there you find the fourth element, the opposite male figure. Every Winter Solstice the Earth Mother gives birth to a boy child, the Sun King, later configured as the Christ Child in the Christmas tradition. This holiday has such resonance perhaps because it is deeply embedded in the human psyche. As mentioned, Arthur is the Deathless Child – the child of cosmic essence – in Britannia, but Taoism, a yin culture, also has basis in the Three Sisters – the Yellow Emperor who founded ancient China is said to have awakened from three goddesses.

There may be some studies of this but I haven’t found any. If you group these elements as figures, the three males and the three females on opposite sides of a circle would give you the 12 of the zodiac – each has a dual face, light and dark (earth and water for the yin elements, and air and fire for the yang elements). But if you make a circle of each three plus one in opposition – two sides of four – then you get a circle which quite resembles the tai chi – each half contains a little of its opposite. You also get an octagon – an eight-sided figure which in Taoism is called a Ba Gua – it is the circle with eight stacks; the emblem of the Dharma Initiative on Lost, and the symbol of the I Ching. It contains the totality of human psyche and impressions in this realm.

If you look back up at the top you can see that the fourth element is actually present in the first image of the Three Magi - it is the star in the upper right handed corner which they seek and it is an eight-cornered star.

I'm probably the only one but I find it interesting that the picture which inadventently became the symbol of an era; Julian Lennon's child drawing called Lucy in the Sky, also has a eight-cornered star in the upper right hand corner.

Obama’s VP: Wes Clark or Jim Webb? DKos diary, 5/18/08

A recent article in the Washington Post says top fundraisers for Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have been privately getting together to converge the two teams. It claims there are growing reports that the only way to repair the rift between the two parties is for Obama to pick a top Clinton surrogate as his VP nominee:

“There’s a gale-force pressure for Obama to choose a Clinton loyalist as a running mate to heal the party but avoid putting her and her formidable baggage on the ticket,” said one Obama ally in Washington. “You hear the names (Ohio Gov. Ted) Strickland, (Indiana Sen. Even) Bayh, and (retired Gen.) Wes Clark almost constantly, and it’s no secret that Jim Johnson and Tom Daschle are purveyors of that wisdom.”

In making his decision, Obama might consider the importance of the historic moment. As he has been called a transitional candidate, so we are today in a transitional awakening – a springpoint of historical dimensions.

The candidate chosen should be one who intuitively saw the contours of that transition coming, as President Bush and his agents embarked on a misplaced adventure in Iraq: What we want here is the one who was the first to see and the first to act. Obama did, and so did Wesley Clark. And at every point in the delusional spiral of policy, Wes Clark provided a stepping stone to the truth and a new direction for the Democrats to take.

The Democrats have taken that path; incrementally at first and now in the mainstream. Democratic policy today on Iraq as it is expressed by Obama can been seen to have historical process and path from September, 2003 when Wesley Clark joined the 2004 race for President, to June, 2007 when Clark’s position on Iraq became the mainstream of the Democrats.

There is no doubt that the current breach in the Democratic Party could be fatal in November, so the question of Obama’s VP is a vital one.

But it is equally important to pick the candidate who will rise with the times and carry the generations with him. And generations here today are more important than region. As VP, Strickland, Bayh or even Ed Rendell, Gov. of PA would help Obama with regions which have been reading unfavorable to him, but – Rendell aside – some of the figures mentioned to bring regional balance and detente with the Clintons are benign Democratic figures and the thinking here goes perhaps: Let’s get a Hillary supporter but a benign one who would be seldom scene and will make no complaints – in the corporate parlance, it would be throwing a bone to the Clintons.

It is always a mistake to do this for in every situation we should strive to pick the best and the brightest among us; even with our enemies, the best and the brightest in opposition make us stronger and better. But in this grouping, General Clark should be the first and only choice considered.

Clark began to conform to the Clinton camp about a year ago and if he planned to do so earlier, there was no suggestion of it even in conversations with his closest friends, relatives and representatives. It is hard to imagine that he would do anything other than lend support to his former Commander-in-Chief, fellow Rhodes Scholar, fellow Arkansas traveler and friends and colleagues for 25 years. The country and the world got a lucky break when President Clinton specifically took General Clark’s plan and advice on Kosovo when the foreign policy establishment was otherwise adrift.

But that was then and this is now. We are today at the critical Millennial Makover, as authors Morley Winograd and Michael D. Hais say in a recent book of that title (Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube and the Future of American Politics). The generation which is rising now will continue to rise and create policy – create our world – into the next 30 years. The overall inclinations of this generation can be found daily here at Daily Kos. It is a harbinger and barometer of that generation’s hopes and yearnings, and that generation’s clear choice is Barack Obama. So what grows here in 2008, will continue to grow and flower into its own political eco system.

It is no secret that Senator Clinton has little support here. As DKos founder, Markos Moulitsas, recently pointed out, she has never registered above 11 percent in a monthly DKos poll of readers.

Thinking generationally seems to come more easily to the artist, monk and poet. It bugs most statisticians, political scientists and objective analysts because it finds its judgments not by specific causality of one event to the next, but by the study of parallel events and alternating events over extremely long periods of time; hundred-years intervals of thousand-year historical movements. But generations are history’s engine. Consider it this way: Imagine inviting Perry Como to have a role in The Beatles, so as to not hurt his feelings or those of his fans. It just doesn’t work, and bringing in the wrong Clinton surrogate to the Obama camp would likewise poison the pudding.

But not Wes Clark. As Senator Clinton’s approval ratings were hovering around zero here two years ago, General Clark’s was sky high. He has always been a favorite of the new generation and it was a web-based campaign which originally urged him to run in 2004. He was, with Mark Warner, the first prominent politician to appear at the first Yearly Kos, and all Presidential contenders would follow at the next.

So whatever else is taken into consideration, Wesley Clark would satisfy the needs of the Party and the new generation.

But Jim Webb, the Senator from Virginia, is also a favorite of the new generation and his election in ’06 was considered one of the first to resonate on the Internet. He was also a favorite here at Daily Kos. The recent publication of his new book, A Time to Fight, suggests he might like to be VP. The Nation says he is running for VP:

“Ronald Reagan's former Secretary of the Navy's got a new campaign book out -- A Time to Fight: Reclaiming a Fair and Just America -- and he is undoubtedly aware of the fact that he's currently topping salon.com Obama Veepstakes" survey.”

Jim Webb is certainly qualified to be President and VP on the First Tier as a former Secretary of the Navy and certainly one of the most versatile and creative individuals ever to enter the Senate. As a well-known author, Webb would pull in the Salon crowd but Obama already has them. Speculation is that as a rural Virginian he would help Obama with voters there. But there is nothing Webb brings to the southeast side of the Smokies and the Blue Ridge that a Southern General doesn’t bring as well.

Clark appeals to the South, the East, the West and the Great White North, and as a generational figure, he links time past with the future. There is a new generation of Democrats rising: Webb, Clark, Kathleen Sebelius, Mark Warner, John Lynch here in NH, hooking up with the Old School and the Wise, including Sam Nunn of Georgia and David Boren of Oklahoma. All of these will converge around Obama into a new kind of Democratic Mandala.

Clark, in his great support for veterans in the '06 race, has already altered the climate of the Democratic Party, bringing a strength of character and a patriotism to Democrats that we have not fully experienced in the most recent years. He should be Obama's first choice in this matter.

More on Lost - the new paradigm - Hurley, Ben, John Locke - the Three Celestial Ones; Mozart's The Magic Flute as primary Aquarian myth


As said below, Lost in the last week's episode has made a transition between Platonic Months; the Age of Pisces is left behind and the Age of Aquarius has awakened. Each age has its External Three - Abraham's Three Visitors, the Three Magi, Taoism's Three Celestial Ones which accompany the new age. Hurley, Ben and John Locke - the Three who intuit the voice of Jacob, are the Three Ones in this transition - one more enters perhaps (Sawyer, possibly) and John Locke takes the initiative in a bodhisattva function - that is, one of these "awakened" with the inner truths brings them to the outside world. And incidently, by linking Old Testament figures with Christian and Aquarian, the Lost telling links at least three zodiac months and possibly more - 6,000 years. The Three Celestial Ones appear in one of the most prinary myths of transition from last to next; they are the three men in a boat who accompany Tamino on his journey to Sarastro in the Magic Flute. In keeping with the Lost themes, The Magic Flute is the journey from the Earth Mother and its church to the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason. Here are two essays from Entering Aquarius on this theme; the first on Mozart's The Magic Flute as the primary myth and text of Entering Aquarius.

The Aquarian Paradigm, from Entering Aquarius

There is in Europe a body of work that came about in the 1960s that is a harbinger of the new millennium. It is the full body of the mature work of Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman. The classic series starts with the most famous of his films, The Seventh Seal, and the haunting specter of death leading the dancers in shadow to the dark side of a hill. The story is about soldiers coming back from the Crusades, only to find northern Europe torn by plague. Only one survives, the comic peasant with a clear vision of the Celestial Mother. It is the end of the Christian age, and Bergman begins the film with an appropriate quote from Revelations. The Seventh Seal is Wormwood. Here is the essence of the prophecy from Revelations : And the seventh angel poured out his vial into the air; and there came a great voice out of the temple of heaven, from the throne, saying, It is done. (Rev. 16:17)

There follows a series of three films called the Silence of God trilogy, filled with a spiritual angst that was characteristic of the age, which could be interpreted as coming from anxieties that arise from sexual awareness in youth, the political uncertainties of the time, the destabilizing side affects of creating great art or other causes. They are masterful films, perhaps the greatest dramatic presentations of that time. But Bergman’s last major public presentation, a film adaptation of Mozart’s The Magic Flute, is perhaps his most important. It is the only moment in all of his work where the character experiences triumph in the end, and looking at the full body of work it becomes clear that the angst of the middle films were part of the spiritual and psychological struggle to find the character’s achievement in the last, and that those anxieties were allayed by the character’s spiritual victory in the last film. Other work would come, but much o fit seeking box-office cash and finding a generic audience.

Bergman’s rendition of The Magic Flute is a harbinger of the age here and pending. Taking his films out of their historical periods and viewing them as an expression of the artist’s own development and sensibility, his full body of work is a shaman’s journey which traverses ages, starting with The Seventh Seal at the very end of the Christian age and ending with The Magic Flute at the beginning of a new age.

Perhaps none surpasses Mozart’s The Magic Flute (1791) in knowledge of the masculine principle and the feminine, yang and yin, first performed at the high end of the Renaissance as the masculine principle and the Renaissance came to dominate the Earth Mother. In Mozart’s story three warriors guard the Lord of the Temple and his counselors, while three sisters accompany the Earth Mother. But now she is the Queen of the Night, the Earth Mother in her third and final phase. She is Kali, the Death Mother. In Bergman’s movie the Queen of the Night is at one point composed with the moon behind her surrounded by zodiac symbols. And Sarastro, the Ruler of the Temple, is shown with his male counsel in caves that resemble those at Lascaux. Sarastro, here in a beautiful presentation at Ithaca College, has commandeered the Earth, the organic realm of the Goddess.

Tamino, the hero of the story, follows on a sacred love quest and in the process moves his allegiance from the Earth Mother to the Lords of the Temple and joins the Lords of the Temple. Three boy spirits in a flying ship accompany the hero and give him three words to guide him in his quest. The words are: steadfast, silence, and obedience.

Mozart’s opera marks history’s turning point. It was the time of revolution throughout the world. It marks the end of the ancient regimes and the monarchies of Europe. And it marks the end to the old Earth Mother cycle of Europe – white phase, rose phase, black phase – which brought them about over the proceeding thousand years. Germany has a special place here and has a special trajectory. The age upon us and that which awakened with Mozart is the Enlightenment. All of Europe entered the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, but it was only the German and Austrian regions of Europe that embraced the Power Principle and at the same time incorporated the yin or feminine sensibility - Abbess Hildegard and Meister Eckhart to Goethe and Leibnitz to Schopenhauer and Jung, embraced the yin world, this tradition follows unbroken from the 12^th century until the present. The other rising Protestant nations rose in denial and opposition to it.

Europe faces a new age today and once again sings in one voice. And it sings a German song; its anthem is Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, written within four years of The Magic Flute. The flag of the European Union is a study in zodiac symbolism, a blue background representing sky and air, the masculine field of Aquarius, and 12 gold stars, the full counsel of the zodiac; the council of Sarastro and the Lords of the Temple.




The Aquarian Mandala from Entering Aquarius
It is worthwhile to look at symmetries as they occur in history and not ignorIt e them or consider them random. The patterns of early Christianity bear looking into as they press westward from Christian Constantinople to empower Christian Rome and subsequently the secular and Protestant movement of northern Europe. The patterns they formed may be the patterns we will form.

Historian Edwin O. Reischauer points out that Japan’s rise to secular power in modern times matches that of northern Europe, and the two rose out of feudalism at the same period but were distinctly separate and unrelated to each other. Another symmetry: calculus, the tool by which the Enlightenment rose to materialization and the catalyst for the age of science was discovered in roughly the same period by mathematician Takakazu Seki Kowa in the East, as it was by Newton and Leibnitz in the West.

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, and regional cultures like those in Calgary and Vancouver where populations are in the area of 50% Chinese and 50% Canadian Caucasian are in the avant garde of North American life. These cities bring together in harmony Asian and Victorian business and cultural ethics and eastern directions of Taoism and Buddhism. So too, Hindu thought finds its way gracefully into Canadian culture in Toronto and the middle Canadian cities, which have recently received a large number of Indian immigrants. One young filmmaker recently made a film about Lord Khrisna returning to earth as a hockey player. (But doesn’t The Great One already carry that spark which dances amongst the suns?)

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. The “old souls” of the old world inhibit clear action and when change does occur, so often it merely consists of breakage of the old, as the new tradition of nihilism since the 1830s in Russia, simply breaks the past. Into pieces. But alienation also opens the West to a new future, and that unique but trecherous condition that deprives the American of ancestral lineage and psychological fullness of old world Asian, African and European, welcomes and rapidly adapts to new growth.

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.

The westward movement of the last century is matched now by an Eastern movement from Asia to the Pacific Coast in Canada as well as in the United States, creating vortex forces in, around and above the Mississippi and the Great Lakes. This effects all classes and castes that enter and changes their destiny forever. It is worth pointing out the Hindu text which says when you leave your homeland, and start from scratch.

Vancouver, with its Hong Kong cash, is developing as a Paris on the Pacific, but the life force also shows it’s power in the plain people. Jackie Chan, master of the karate opera, is to North America today what Jimmy Cagney was 80 years ago, and if Cagney represented the collective promise and optimism for the millions of immigrants who swarmed to Ellis Island from Europe and Ireland, Chan does the same for the large immigration from the East, who settle primarily as a new American influence to the west and the north of the Mississippi.

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.

North Americans have more in common with other North Americans than they do with Europeans. This transcends caste and religion, which, in the U.S., have entirely different structures than in Europe and Asia. And it has been like this for a long time and even in the darkest days. W.J. Cash pointed out that the wealthy white woman of the South in the 19^t century had more in common with her black maid than she did with people out of the region. And Thomas Nelson Page, a popular Southern writer writing at the end of the Civil War, pointed out that the Southerner had more in common with his Yankee enemy than with foreigners.

Outside of academia, almost none default to Europeanism in America, particularly in the South and the Midwest. And people who live near the borders of Mexico or Canada share in those cultures in direct relation to the proximity of their borders.

These all three together, Canada, Mexico and the United States, make for the most dynamic singular cultural union in the world today. In terms of global action and passion, they are the center of the world as we enter the new millenium.

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 develop. 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. My prediction is that the Hamilton way is temporary, and once we are all here and found the place we like, we will stay here and grow here to our own Peoples, as Jefferson envisioned a free society. But we are not all here yet and will not be for another 100 years, and in that time, flow in capital, industry and people will come from the East. Then the regions will settle, find themselves, and begin to look inward to find themselves as new people in a new place. Till then, the Hamilton model is appropriate. And in the end, we will be an East/West nation and an East/West continent.

As Revelation closes the gate for one epoch which began its historical march in Constantinople, the Indian visionary opens a gate to the next. Here is Black Elk, in language like that of St. John: “The oldest one spoke again: ‘Your Grandfathers all over the world are having a council, and they have called you here to teach you.’ His voice was very kind, but I shook all over with fear now, for I knew that these were not old men, but the Powers of the World. And the first was the Power of the West; the second, of the North; the third, of the East; the fourth, of the South; the fifth, of the Sky; the sixth, of the Earth. I knew this, and was afraid, until the first Grandfather spoke again: “Behold them yonder where the sun goes down, the thunder beings! You shall see, and have from them my power; and they shall take you to the high and lonely center of the earth that you may see; even to the place where the sun continually shines, they shall take you there to understand.”

And here is Black Elk as the perennial guide – from Cooper to Kevin Cosner -- for 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: “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 to the Self as it unfolds here on what still is a new continent and in what is surely a new age. As Bunyan’s Christian pilgrim seeks a life of the highest integrity and moral perseverance in a world torn asunder in the 1600s, so Frazier speaks to us today. 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 sages, 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 the edge broken, and in a brief but perfect life he finds in the center, whole. And he finds wholeness and completion in the house of the Indian. It speaks well of the North American journey, a journey for all which is just beginning.

Notes on Lost, 5/8/08 – John Locke is the Aquarian

For Lost watchers, last night’s episode was a turning point. Ben Linus, who was identified as a Christ figure in an earlier season (The Grand Inquisitor – the Christ wound when he was in the prison cell - Dostoyevsky's chapter in The Brothers Karamazov about the Christ returning and put in prison) tells that he is or was the Chosen One, but it is over for him now. Now John Locke – whose name suggests the Enlightenment – is the Chosen One. This conforms with the millennial shift of Platonic Months; the two-thousand year passages of the zodiac. We have left the Age of Pisces – which began with the birth of the Christ and in which the Christ was avatar – and entered the Age of Aquarius – technically, Aquarius rose just as Lost went to the airwaves. The Platonic Months shift or alternate every two thousand years, as novelist Robertson Davies points out in an essay on the subject, from yin to yang. The passing age, Pisces, was a yin age, marked by water (Victoria, men in ships, world conquest via water). He warns, that - hippie lore aside - Aquarius is a yang age - an Age of Titans.

Linus tells John at the end of this tenure of a burden: Being Chosen has its consequences, as he has come to kill his own daughter, Alex.

Lost creator J.J. Abrams went to Sarah Lawrence College where Joseph Campbell taught. Abrams is likely to have been steeped in the Campbell atmosphere as it was strong when he was undergraduate there – Campbell, a mythologist and anthropologist, had just completed a landmark series of discussions on mythology with Bill Moyers - The Power of Myth - held at George Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch and aired on PBS. This series changed the nature of Hollywood.

For anyone knowledgeable in this region, there are clear and distinct themes in Lost that were elucidated by Campbell and C.G. Jung. Campbell was the editor of the portable Viking edition of Jung’s work. As per last night’s episode of Lost, it can be seen that the Lost island is a configuration of psyche and Self – a cosmic castle with its own space/time properties in the middle of an Ocean – Clair is Anima and Christian (her father) is Self – as Jung put it, Self is the interim guide between an individual and the Unconscious. The shack, which only Ben, Locke and occasionally Hurley sense or intuit, characterizes the psyche – Jacob is the pure voice of the Unconscious.

This is a common dream configuration in Jung and expressed throughout Eastern philosophy and religion and in world folk lore – ocean, castle, cosmic guide, Anima, Self. And here last night on the island, John – who takes the reins from Ben as we enter the new millennium, is asked by Christian (all names are meaningful in Lost) to ask the correct question. John Locke asks the correct question: How can the island be saved? The island is Psyche at its center; it is the House of God and the intuition which comes to us through the intermediary of the Self, comes from there: John Locke is the guide. Without John Locke as guide in the new millenium, we are Lost.

More on Lost at Quigley in Exile and Lost as an Aquarian Creation Myth at Entering Aquarius.