A further thought I had...

...after leaving electronic access, such that I could not put it down immediately.

I know we all remember with great sadness the passing of our friend last year. At that time, I quoted from "The Magician Within": ([link|http://pub13.ezboard.com/fiwetheyfrm117.showMessage?topicID=130.topic|here])

"Suicide is related to self-wounding and scarification practices. The suicide's Ego has misunderstood the call of the Self to die to its old ways of being, feeling, and thinking. In the absence of a spiritual sense of how to hear this call, the Ego takes the message literally. Unable to withstand devastating unconscious pressures to end the Ego's present orientation - which the Ego may regard as the only possible way of living - an individual may end his life. The suicide has been unable to find adequate containment in his crazy time, and consequently he cannot bear the terror and wonder of his own extraordinariness."

Many apocalyptic dreams seem to be calling for the death of the current world, and we misperceive this as the end of the world, when what we are really recognizing is that the old way of doing things just doesn't work any more. Unfortunately, unlike in our own minds where we can escape the "crazy time" by changing ourselves, we are trapped in the "crazy time" that this world has become.

I think that's as clear as any. And to an extent, "the death of the present world" must be -somehow- seen to be merely, the birth of ..

The trouble always is - the monkey mind begins an immediate +/- 'list', imagining perfect discrimination via logic, of "the Good". And so it goes. We just don't get, Siva saying, Look! I am become Death, the destroyer of Worlds.. as the necessary prelude to all creation.

I kinda like Churchill's observation as the tides were changing somewhat.. for Britain's survival, ..this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end - it is perhaps.. the end of the beginning.

As Bill Oxley has grasped - it's Two Wars now.. the obvious one here and abroad and.. the utterly necessary corollary: a battle next to retain that which has distinguished America, that which is worth fighting to retain - every time someone wants to trade for 'security'.

We have our home-grown Fundamentalists too. Their regurgitated hate and literal tales of archaic concepts of eternal torture: lie, I think - behind the horrific kinds of 'action movie' entertainment - with heaped dead burnt bodies. Entertainment? Nasty stuff for formatory minds.

Believe we'll need to re-appreciate the Founding Mothers' *brilliance* in their realization of the necessary wall between infinite flavors of personal religious 'beliefs' and | State. (IMhO there is much feminine insight about people, in our basic documents - whichever males put the words on paper)

We may assume next - this is 'the beginning' only - and study perhaps the Israeli citizens for cues on how one manages to live fully, while anonymous assassins are (somewhere). Most of the world knows little of our imagined 'security' and so we have been unable to empathize with most of the world. We will learn the survival and perhaps earn the empathy, next. If we do not make that effort, the apocalypse lovers shall wallow in their perverse satisfaction.

Ashton

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