China brings John Lennon’s Imagine to the Olympics

In the first ads for the 2008 Olympics in China, aired last night on prime-time television, the theme song used was John Lennon’s Imagine. Some thoughts on that below from Quigley in Exile.

Free as a Bird: John Lennon's Unfinished Journey

On the 25th Anniversary of His Death

"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.

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.

Obama, Bloomberg, Schwarzenegger Triumverate: Obama and Bloomberg = Roosevelt and Eisenhower

A voice of the Rising Generation calls forth on Daily Kos and asks the question, "Would Mike Bloomberg be a good Vice President for Barack Obama," bringing forth cries from the heart and distress.

But it is a good idea today especially as it looks as if McCain is turning to Romney. It will destroy all McCain's credibility as a decent American who opposes torture as Romney is second only to Torquenada in this area.

Obama should snag Bloomberg AND his bud Arnold Schwarzenegger as the "post partisan" model for the new century.

In this model Obama is the transcendent leader, like Roosevelt, who has the job of choosing a supreme manager, like Eisenhower - even more important than VP (Jim Webb or Kathleen Sebelius possibly), a task force perhaps on environment with Bloomberg/Arnold sharing chair and given highest national priority (based on the Mark Lynas premise of warming in Six Degrees). Other things - including the current millennialist religious hysteria in the Middle East - come with the dust and are gone with the wind. But the picture presented by Lynas in his books presents a problem that will not go away and may well take us away.

These two men - Bloomberg and Schwarzenegger - are the best managers in the country and like Eisenhower, they have the ability to identify the problem in its largest sphere and apply the suitable fix.

My feeling is that other Republicans will have no ability in this (environment), neither will Gore. Gore is a scholar not a fixer and manager - he has done his part well. The Republicans and half the Democrats have the "earth caretaker" position - they like it because it is in the Bible. But this premise is ill suited and narrow (and the Bible story is about investing money).

Ultimately we do not care for the earth; the earth cares for us - ours is a primal and symbiotic relationship (a Taoist/Buddhist view get more to the nature of the issue).

Obama's writing in The Audacity of Hope shows he has the supple and subtle mind; his understanding in the "religion" chapter in particular of the complex positions of Adams, Henry and Jefferson and how the elite conspired specifically to keep out the Baptists and the common people, shows he has the abilities for transcendent leadership; that is, Obama has the ability to see things to their core and solve them there.

The Al Gore Option

DKos diary, 3/28/08

Time this week presents a perspective from Joe Klein titled Is Al Gore the Answer. Three things: A. It looks today like Obama has it; B. It looks like Elvis will not (cannot) leave the building so maybe Obama doesn’t have it; C. It looks like one of those times in history when the Trickster is at hand and anything can (will) happen. In this environment Klein brings in a more or less classic scenario: A brokered convention in which a third individual appealing to all to some degree is bought in and in this case that could be (should be) Al Gore.

Klein writes:

Let's say the elders of the Democratic Party decide, when the primaries end, that neither Obama nor Clinton is viable. ... All they'd have to do would be to convince a significant fraction of their super delegate friends, maybe fewer than 100, to announce that they were taking a pass on the first ballot at the Denver convention, which would deny the 2,025 votes necessary to Obama or Clinton. What if they then approached Gore and asked him to be the nominee, for the good of the party-and suggested that he take Obama as his running mate? ... A prominent fund raiser told me, 'Gore-Obama is the ticket a lot of people wanted in the first place.

I think it was Emerson (or maybe Kerouac) who said that people don’t make history; historic events make people. The question we might ask ourselves at this moment is: What is the critical issue of our time? The war in Iraq? Oil? The declining dollar and the failing economy? China and India rising? Unification of the country and the crisis of authority in Washington, D.C.? Russian bombers circling Alaska? In that regard Gore might be considered. His name is singularly attached to the issue of global warming and if this becomes the paramount issue, he comes to the fore with it.

What is interesting about Gore in the current political climate is that as a Clinton Administration guy, he, almost alone among the rising fourth generation, has cache. His popularity transcends his own generation. His ratings at Daily Kos last year were sky high – somewhere in the 80% approval if I recall, while Senator Clinton’s hovered around zero. So he could, as Klein says, appeal to the broad spectrum.

But the issues should (and will) bring forth the best candidate to solve that particular problem. And one more fire season across the Southwest may bring us to the issue of supreme importance, global warming.

I feel that we are still in denial on this issue. We bring forth simple or inappropriate solutions like the "caretaker of the earth" one based on a Bible teaching (which is actually about investing money). But we are symbiotes with the earth and the earth cares for us. Or we rush into wrong directions like biofuel which makes things worse.

It is still snowing this morning outside my window here in the north country of New Hampshire and we tend to think about it more when it is hot. Perhaps we will need a Pearl Harbor to finally face up to this issue. Mark Lynas’s new book, Six Degrees, Our Future on Hotter Planet, presents a picture that is now not unlikely. It brings a vision of danger that sends all of history’s villains into shadow. But here there is not Hitler, no Stalin. Here it is Pogo’s maxim: We have found the villain and he is us.

As The Guardian’s review, titled Six Steps to Hell puts it:

By the end of the century, the Earth could be more than 6C hotter than it is today, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. We know that would be bad news - but just how bad? How big a rise will it take for the Alps to melt, the oceans to die and desert to conquer Europe and the Americas?

I am one of the people who thought that Gore was not always a great Vice President. The Clinton foreign policy initiatives which he fully endorsed and advanced were dangerous and naïve. He tended to listen to novelty perspectives and pop culture mavens. But I also believe that he has grown and improved as a man and as a public figure in the last ten years and that is a remarkable and rare transition for someone his (and my) age. He has earned the title of Elder as many who claim it now have not.

I hope for an Obama Presidency. My best scenario would be a post-partisan commission to face and manage global warming chaired by Mike Bloomberg, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jodi Rell, Governor of Connecticut, who have already made major strides on this issue which have left the federal government in the dark. And a hundred years from now I’d hope the names of those commissioners be remembered as the names Eisenhower and Marshall and Roosevelt are recalled from the Second World War and its aftermath.

But a commission like this would work just as well with Al Gore at the helm as a transcendent leader.

Bill Clinton: Man Without a Country

By Bernie Quigley for The Free Market News Network on 3/22/08

From Sam Stein at The Huffington Post:

MSNBC is reporting that on the campaign trail today in Charlotte, North Carolina, the former president said a general election matchup between his wife, Sen. Clinton, and Sen. John McCain would be between "two people who love this country" without "all this other stuff that always seems to intrude itself on our politics."

Former Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton has applied propaganda strategies like we have not seen since the Jim Crow days, implying that Obama would be unfit to be President of the United States through innuendo, mnemonic slander and word and theme association, because he is black.

Understandably, it has been a bad week for the Clintons. The country as a whole has been through a major cultural turning due to a speech given by Barack Obama that will be remembered through the ages. Until now Obama was compared to Jack Kennedy. Now he is being compared to Lincoln. Can’t be good when the comments coming out of the mouths of Clinton apparatchiks call to mind Paulie Walnuts.

The implication now, of course, of the current slander, is that Barack Obama is not a patriot. This is Scorched Earth policy coming from the Few and the Brave: Ferraro, Ellen, Penn, James Carville and The Clinton Cult. There are three parties now: The Democrats, the Republicans and the Clintons; two parties and a personality cult.

Clinton calling on patriotism to soldiers in North Carolina is astonishing. I am a veteran and lived in the hills of North Carolina during the Clinton Presidency. If any veteran in those parts was Fond of Bill it escaped my attention. Many started carrying Glocks publicly, raising Rottweilers and joining local militia groups in direct response to Clinton's amateurish and irresponsible tenure, considering it a failure of federalism and a complete abdication of moral character.

Indeed, veterans and soldiers I knew in North Carolina hated Clinton. Many veterans considered him a coward and an expedient. During the Clinton Presidency two secession groups started; The League of the South and The New England Confederation. Both of these groups - which have now morphed into several - considered the Clinton Administration to be a complete failure of American character and decided it was time to move on. The red state/blue state division - civil war by other means - also directly returns to the character of Bill Clinton and his tenure as President.

To dig back: Here in New England we tend to not be flag wavers, but there are stern standards of the traditions of duty and service which we tend to teach through the most dour of moral parables. Edward Everett Hale's Man Without a Country pushed upon us round the seventh grade in rural Rhode Island public school comes to mind. It is the moral lesson of a man who was less than patriotic and responsive to duty as the elders determined, and who was, like Bush, Cheney and Clinton, condemned to a life of constant overcompensating or under compensating. That is, when he was asked to cross the first river as his life opened he did not. And was condemned subsequently to wander as if in a fog in his elder years and remain there throughout, exiled and alone as a ship at sea, an aging Child of God lost in his own head.

Is Hillary Running for Vice President?: Orlando Patterson - Black man on the phone

by Bernie Quigley for The Free Market News Network

Bill Clinton and his Decepticons are now actually running plaintiff wife Hillary for Vice President on an Obama ticket. They can feel it is up for them and Obama will eventually take it. So the chant this week of Unstoppable is to pitch them – Hillary and Obama - as an undeniable unit; bringing them together and bringing Hillary (and Bill, don’t cha know) on a new last chance strategy; a graded 12 year ride – Hillary as VP in ’08, and President in ’12 and ‘16.

It is, of course, absurd that Hillary, running second, would actually call on Obama for VP as she has been saying she would recently. The Clintons have been claiming all these weeks before that Obama is inadequate and suggesting through nuance, as Harvard’s Orlando Patterson says on the op-ed pages of the NYTs this morning, that he is inadequate because he is black. These mnemonic devises amplify and fix in the press as they are inherently propaganda stratigies and are devised and intended to. Clinton here gives the impression that she would without a doubt now select Obama for VP just as she is failing, so that when the tide changes – and it already has – they will still have survivable options: under these radically new, undesirable and unanticipated circumstances Obama should certainly take her as VP as she certainly would undoubtedly have taken him. As a last resort they – Bill, Penn, the Carville Cartel - will send Hillary aboard as VP. As a propaganda strategy it is less slick, less subtle than what usually comes out of Madison Avenue, say, during Super Bowl. It is more akin to what came out of the Soviet Union during the 1950s.

The Clintons are now holding on with their fingernails. Their shills have descended to a quite course application of propaganda; coercing, intimating and intimidating. There are now three parties: The Republicans, the Democrats and the Clintons. Client 9 will again cast the Clintons in shadow and what Spitzer does will reflect on the Democrats as a whole and our country as a whole. And it will contrast with the Clintons in the White House and where they brought us in that ignominious time when Bill was unapologetically tapping the undergraduates. Client 9 further unravels the Clinton Party as its generational apologists who have again and again supported Clinton as Avatar and made the Democratic Party defenders of the indefensible (did somebody say Marc Rich?) are fast coming out of denial.

But this is the Elvis curse. Elvis refuses to leave the building and is an embarrassment to himself and to all of us late in his life. I expect to see Bill in the god suit next; fat, sweating like a pig and drugged, crooning sadly to dead enders in a Las Vegas casino.

Professor Patterson’s perceptive and thoughtful op-ed in today’s NYTs, Red Phone in Black and White, makes the point that Clinton insinuates in the 3 am TV ad, which shows a little white girl frightened in the night, that the girl is afraid because a black man would be answering the phone. He writes:

I have spent my life studying the pictures and symbols of racism and slavery, and when I saw the Clinton ad’s central image — innocent sleeping children and a mother in the middle of the night at risk of mortal danger — it brought to my mind scenes from the past. I couldn’t help but think of D. W. Griffith’s "Birth of a Nation," the racist movie epic that helped revive the Ku Klux Klan, with its portrayal of black men lurking in the bushes around white society. The danger implicit in the phone ad — as I see it — is that the person answering the phone might be a black man, someone who could not be trusted to protect us from this threat.

It is interesting that in the comment section of that article several people referred to a "Bogie Man" which, where I grew up in Rhode Island in the 50s, meant a black man. Another commentator suggested that Bill Clinton suggesting someone coming "in the night" to take the election from Hillary was a draw on racist attitudes in a racially polarized state.

Good points. There was indeed something sick and twisted in the clip – an insidious threat; Red Threat or Yellow Peril or H. Rap Brown threatening to burn down the neighborhood: We built it and we're gonna burn it down. Honkies and all.

But for some reason I started thinking about the Odessa Steps sequence in Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin, a classic propaganda film from the 1930s. It was suggested by the tightness of the close up and the coarseness of the heavy-handed telling and the overt propaganda in these early silent films.

Clinton & Co. have adopted language and strategy reminiscent of Soviet-era propaganda: Deceive forcefully and the faithful will reinforce. Her claim last week that her time as First Lady gave her experience in foreign policy was in itself enough to gag a horse, but making such an absurd statement with a bunch of Admirals and army guys at her side was reminiscent of the old Politburo propaganda forums which always had puffy-chested Generals standing by with long faces and long rows of medals to accompany Khrushchev's ridiculous pronouncements.

All I could think about was Mrs. Khrushchev. It sounded ridiculous to anyone not in the cult.