I just found this on craigslist. Painful, and moving, and touches me in so many ways.

I graduated from college in May, and this summer seemed like a good time to go through the box of papers and assignments I had been saving since the start, both to reminisce and to do a little cleanup.

Tucked in a folder of an old notebook at the very bottom of the box was the essay that follows. Written in longhand, it was the first assignment from the first class in my first semester.

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An e-mail from someone visiting family in Pakistan. Via reddit:

My mom, brothers and sister in law and I were shopping when I received a text from my father asking us to come to the hotel because he feared for our safety since Benazir Bhutto had been shot. I ran inside the store to tell my mother this, and as we were running out of building filled with small shops, all I saw was mass amounts of dust in the air and people running all over the place panicked. All I heard was people yelling and telling us not to go outside because people might be shooting in the streets and told us to just keep going upstairs. We all started running up the stairs and stopped on the second floor and I noticed that my mother was panicking and crying. I realized that my legs and hands were shaking and I felt a sense of helplessness that I can’t even explain to you at this moment. I only kept thinking of the fires I had seen being set to markets in the past when there have been riots in the city and my only thought was that if this happened to this building, how were we going to escape.

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“Nothing rests; everything moves; everything vibrates.”

– The Kybalion

I’m in the Los Angeles area visiting family for the holidays. Being here again is intense. In a way, all the sensitivity that I’m developing really works against me here; in another way, it shows me more directly and viscerally the violence that the senses are dealt.

I notice that every single square foot in this city is controlled and manmade. Roads, sidewalks, signs, buildings. The patches of green here and there are strictly circumscribed, trimmed, mowed.

I go to the nearby mall, and it’s the holidays, which means that it’s a hell of a time to park. I circle for twenty minutes in this huge parking lot before snagging a spot. Then I go inside, and the lights and sounds and people and everything are all bright and flashy and plastic.

And I think about how the way of nature is to blend and harmonize. And I think how the way of modern society is to cry out for attention: Advertising, fashion, cars, people. But the net effect of so many voices yelling so loud is to numb.

I feel everything as vibration and energy, and around here even the bushes, trimmed into profanely round shapes, vibrate with a pseudo-artificial buzz. The colors and sounds and conversations and machines all jostle and scream with the discord of a heap of humanity not knowing its purpose or place in the scheme of things, having forgotten about the rhythm and ritual of sacred life, and aligning instead with the vastly entertaining and ultimately illusory artifacts of the material world.

I feel the vibrations screeching like a cat being dragged across a blackboard.

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There are no shortcuts to experiencing Mystery.

Sometimes I trawl the Internet, looking for others who write about the same kinds of things as me. Or I talk to different people, hoping that I will find others of like mind. I look for others who access the Mystery, who might enrich my life thus.

And probably they are out there. Possibly some of them might even blog. But the inherent problem with these approaches is simply that they (reading, talking) are based in language. They are words, whether written or spoken; and words are symbols for the reality, not the reality itself. And the very essence of Mystery is that it lies somewhere beyond the range of representation. It is both simpler and more complex than that, because it’s just direct experience.

We are so awash in symbolic thought that we can get entirely trapped in it. Our minds are powerful things. What religion do we respond to? Which football team do we support? All of our choices, our identifications, are closely aligned with whatever symbols ring true for us, what stories speak best to our beings. Even something as serious as our political stage is nothing more than seeing whose story you believe in the most.

And this isn’t to say that stories are untrue. They’re true insofar as they resonate and carry us forward on our path.

But they’re not enough. But we are so trapped in this world of stories and symbols that many of us begin to think that there’s even no such thing as ultimate Truth. Well, there is. It’s just not necessarily translatable into English.

Access to Truth can only be accomplished through practice that leads through direct experience and heart-to-heart transmission.

This is what is lacking, and becomes ever more lacking the more our society embraces — and becomes entrenched in — increasingly arcane, symbolic levels of communication.

IMHO.

This is a fascinating personal look into the interaction between American foreign policy and terrorism. It’s an excerpt from an article titled “Why Do They Hate Us?” by Mohsin Hamid, in the July 22, 2007 edition of the Washington Post.

[U.S. foreign] policies are unknown to most Americans. They form only minor footnotes in U.S. history. But they are the chapter titles of the histories of other countries, where they have had enormous consequences. America’s strength has made it a sort of Gulliver in world affairs: By wiggling its toes it can, often inadvertently, break the arm of a Lilliputian.

When my family moved back to Pakistan, I was given a front-row seat from which to observe one such obscure episode. In 1980, Lahore was a sleepy and rather quiet place. Pakistan’s second-largest city was still safe enough for a 9-year-old to hop on his bicycle and ride around unsupervised.

But that was about to change. Soviet troops had recently rolled into Afghanistan, and the U.S. government, concerned about Afghanistan’s proximity to the oil-rich Persian Gulf and eager to avenge the humiliating debacle of the Vietnam War, decided to respond. Building on President Jimmy Carter’s tough line, President Ronald Reagan offered billions of dollars in economic aid and sophisticated weapons to Pakistan’s dictator, Gen. Mohammed Zia ul-Haq. In exchange, Zia supported the mujaheddin, the Afghan guerrillas waging a modern-day holy war against the Soviet occupation. With the help of the CIA, jihadist training camps sprung up in the tribal areas of Pakistan. Soon Kalashnikov assault rifles from those camps began to flood the streets of Lahore, setting in motion a crime wave that put an end to my days of pedaling unsupervised through the streets.

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This is an interesting post on the honeybee die-off crisis, a.k.a. colony collapse disorder. From Druid Journal:

The Plight of the Honey Bee

Almost everyone is aware by now that honey bees are having a very, very difficult year. Bee colonies are dying all over the United States, imperiling not only the supply of honey, but also crops that depend on the bee for pollination, such as almonds, strawberries, blueberries, apples, watermelons, cranberries, and soybeans. While there are other pollinators out there, the honey bee is the only domesticated pollinator — it is the only pollinator that can be moved from crop to crop as necessary, and the only pollinator that can be depended on to serve crops that are not native to North America. As such it is essential to the large-scale agribusiness of the United States.

The death of a colony is frightful. First, the older adult worker bees begin to disappear, until only the younger ones are left. The workforce grows smaller gradually, becoming too small to care for the bees’ young. The Queen begins appearing outside the hive more frequently than normal. The bees seem reluctant to eat the food provided by the beekeeper.

Within a week or two, all the workers have disappeared entirely. They have gone away, and do not return. There are very few dead bees found near the hive. Food stores are abandoned uneaten. The babies are left growing in their hexagonal chambers, and they quickly die with no adults to feed them.

BUT WHY?

No one knows. There are terrible rumors flying around about cell phone radiation, pesticides and insecticides, parasites, feed from genetically modified crops… Each of these ideas has evidence for and against it.

The Meditation

Back in April, I did a meditation in which an animated crystalline honey bee made a prominent appearance. When I learned more about the troubles they were undergoing, I decided to try and do a meditation on them, to see if I could establish some connection and find out what was going on.

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This post from craigslist touched me.

Over the past couple of months, I have noticed many, many posts concerning white trash and welfare people.

I am a welfare kid. Oldest of 5 children, mother has a 9th grade education. She married my father at 15 (he was 21), had me a year later at age 16, and so forth. Father has an 8th grade education. Dear dad took off after 10 years of marriage — have heard I have several unknown siblings out there somewhere. No, he never once paid a penny of child support. He just left.

Mom’s family is from Missouri — you guessed it, trailer parks, shacks, too many people stuffed into small houses with too many animals, bugs and parasites. We were the runny-nosed kids in worn-out clothes people looked down on to make themselves feel better.

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I recently read an article by one of my favorite “post-civilization” writers, John Michael Greer. His writings show clear, balanced, incisive, and deep thinking and generally explicate positions that resonate with me. He thinks in terms of magic as well as post-civilization living, a synthesis that is of great interest to me.

Greer wrote this essay as a personal e-mail and then gave permission for it to be circulated. It is a response to a book titled Globalize Liberation, which I haven’t read but I gather is an anthology of various writings. The recipient of this e-mail wrote a chapter in that book, which you can read here (but I didn’t, and understood this essay just fine).

I decided to reproduce Greer’s article in its entirety, despite its length, in part to remind myself to return to it, because there are a lot of great ideas in it that I haven’t yet begun to assimilate.

If you are interested, you can also read it here with an introduction:
http://www.rachel.org/library/getfile.cfm?ID=523

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There’s a shift in the balance of power in our national politics.

Does that mean anything?

I chose not to vote on Election Day. I know, I know, many fine soldiers fought and died for my freedom, so that I would have the right to vote. Yet somehow I found it impossible to shake off the deep cynicism I have about corruption in our political systems, not to mention in our civilization.

The seeds of the future are, I think, not to be found in the dominant power structures of today.

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What does it mean that someone tried to steal my moped?

Is the world dangerous? Or do I create the danger that I experience?

It’s interesting to explore how I may have contributed to this incident. A big clue was that when it happened, though I felt afraid and angry, one of my major emotions was relief.

The moped I bought was by a company called E-max. It was a cutting-edge, experimental, electric vehicle — it ran on batteries, which appealed to my vague “green” ideals.

The problem from the very beginning was that my objectives were completely unclear. Though the main thing was that it would be more convenient to have another vehicle (we are a one-car household), I confess that the idea of riding a cutting-edge technology zero-emission no-gas vehicle seduced me into buying without thinking it through rationally. Not until after I impulsively put down two grand for it did I begin to question it; and by then it was too late.

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