Translocalization to Portland, Oregon, May 2011
A Narrative of Space, Time, and Hazard,
with Some Philosophical Commentary
When, in October 2009, I rented and moved into my friend Phaedora’s semi-furnished condominium at 6148 Antelope Villas Circle in Prescott, Arizona, which finances had forced her to vacate, I knew already that it was in foreclosure proceedings and that my stay there was going to be limited. Nevertheless, the opportunity to try to organize my books and papers in a three-bedroom living situation (plus a garage) was very appealing, and I eventually got most of my books out of storage and onto shelves for the first time in over a decade.
Over the years, I have put together what are, objectively speaking, relatively small but core collections in the areas of logic, philosophy, and mathematics; Gurdjieff, the Baha’i Faith, world religions, theology, psychology, and consciousness; economics, ecology, and political science; linguistics, communication, and languages; and international law, international organization, and the United Nations. I also have approximately 40 boxes of books, magazines, and other materials specifically in and about the Esperanto language, which I had started learning in grade school and which, to the perpetual surprise of most people in the US, is still an active movement. My father’s mother also left a considerable quantity of genealogical research materials, along with boxes of letters, pictures, etc. I also have a collection of a couple thousand classical LPs, plus audio and video tapes, CDs, DVDs, and more. So, it has all accumulated not only into a considerable quantity of information but also into a sheer physical bulk.
In early 2010, Malon Clark, a long-time friend, a former MBA from Penn State and now a saint of “voluntary simplicity” and a fellow drop-out from the ideology and culture of capitalism, moved in and provided excellent cuisine and lots of sympathy for progressive causes. His intellectual specialty is American history, with a critical Chomskyan focus on the myths by which the ruling classes try to rewrite history and to justify their predatory existence. Together, we listened to and sang The Internationale and rediscovered the forgotten history of socialism and its significant accomplishments in the USA, such as the 8-hour work day and the 40-hour work week. Together we raged at the recent Republican and capitalist class efforts to scapegoat working people and to smash their universal human rights to associate and collectively bargain.
In specific, I also learned more about Truman’s decision to use the atomic bomb in 1945 – a pivotal decision that, of course, subverted the United Nations Charter even as the US was pretending to be its biggest supporter. That decision also launched the arms race. That race subsequently consumed trillions of dollars of resources and distracted the world from seeing and cooperating in solving its deeper, more structural problems, such as over-population , pollution, climate change, and the imminence of the wide-scale ecological, agricultural, and social collapses that now confront us. We also studied the many illegal US interventions into the domestic affairs of other countries (see, e.g., Wikipedia under “US interventions” and “US covert interventions”).
Doing all of this is, for me, part of a necessary intellectual effort to understand why we are where we are as a global community, why we are not further along, and, in general, the nature of the forces at work in our times. In brief, in contrast to surface appearances, there is a frequent very negative side to US history and to US politics and foreign policy that we in the general public are not taught in ordinary schools and which our elected leaders do not truthfully acknowledge. This legacy of racism, imperialism, and the subordination of rational self-government to the private interests of the business community is part of what we need to become aware of and to renounce as part of building Earth Community.
The US has a great potential role to play in building Earth Community, but it must play this role through the virtue of humility and of learning from others and from its own mistakes. It cannot play this role through arrogant bombast and hegemony. Obama knows this and is acting on this principle as best he can, I think.
In any case, I spent whatever spare time I had in working on my book, Launching Dates for the Voyage to Earth Community, in which I call upon the reader to help build Earth Community by supplementing our typical religious, national, and seasonal calendars by conscious use of the Global Special Observances promoted by the United Nations and by global civil society.
All totaled, it was a very happy and productive 17 months, for which I deeply owe those who made it possible. Thank you, Phaedora. Thank you, Malon.
I had visited Portland before, including during a Unitarian Universalist national conference three or four years ago and also including last summer, when Kendra, my daughter, was graduating with a Masters Degree in Chinese Medicine from the National College of Natural Medicine. She also announced that she was going to have a baby. My impressions of the city had always been very positive, and now Kendra’s pregnancy and my impending grandfatherhood made the decision to go there doubly imperative. Kendra’s baby—Maxwell Orion Carmichael—was indeed born, healthy but not without a struggle, on February 28, 2011.
In, I think early March 2011, Malon and I learned that the condominium was indeed finally going up for auction on May 9. Since I was now compelled to move, I started packing books and other items and putting them in relatively neat order in a storage unit in Chino Valley in what became an almost daily procedure.
In April, as the deadline approached, almost all my time went into preparing things for the move. I was very lucky in eventually securing a transfer of my job from the Wal-Mart in Prescott, where I had been cashiering for over three years, to a Wal-Mart in Hood River, Oregon. (My cashiering job at Wal-Mart, possibly a surprising development for some of my friends, started as a convenient supplement to my Social Security Disability income. It ended up being vital to making the move possible.)
On May 3, however, just before we were due to start the move, my main computer was hit by a very nasty virus or Trojan Horse. Self-help efforts to eliminate it were fruitless, and eventually I had to rely on a very polite and profession technical support firm to clean it out and to deal with some other problems that had allowed this malware to get into my system in the first place. Fortunately, only one of my two computers was hit (the other one being off at the time), but both computers needed work to optimize their performance and to protect them better from future attacks. The bill: over $300. Ouch! But there was no choice in the matter. I had to do it.
Finally, on Thursday, May 5, we began the move by picking up a 26-foot truck from a Penske facility in Chino Valley. We spent that afternoon unloading the Chino Valley storage unit into the truck. However, we did not finish that (seemingly endless) task until early Friday afternoon. We then began to work on the things that remained in the condominium. Finishing that took us the rest of Friday and all day and evening Saturday. We had to leave behind several pieces of furniture, including a couch, the dining table and chairs, a washer and dryer, a couple desks, and a large and very comfortable bed. There was simply no room in the truck, and there was also going to be no space at the house of my high school and college friend Steve Blair, from whom I was going to be renting a small bedroom in Milwaukie, Oregon.
We left, finally, on Sunday, May 8, at about 11:30 in the morning. Malon’s help in this process was absolutely vital. I could not have done this move by myself alone, and I had no money for hired help or for more expensive methods of moving.
The initial part of the trip westward through Arizona on Interstate 40 was without incident, but as the day passed the winds picked up, and by late afternoon, we were facing a steady 40-mph headwind that lasted through most of the next day. There were wind advisories posted on the highways, and we actually saw two cars with hitched trailers that had overturned. The fact that we were towing my car behind the truck also slowed us down considerably.
We were in eastern California going up a long, steep grade when the first sign of trouble appeared. I noticed that the engine temperature was creeping toward the red danger zone. What I did not know was that these truck engines were designed to shut off automatically when they reached high temperatures. Nobody had mentioned this "minor detail" to us when we picked up the truck. So, there I was in a lane of traffic going uphill, and, suddenly -- no power! Fortunately, I did manage to glide over to the side of the road, trying to figure out what was going on. I thought the truck had experienced some serious breakdown.
We sat for perhaps half an hour, letting the engine cool. We then tried to start it again. It did start, but we just barely made it up the hill before it would have shut off again.
This was the first of what turned out to be probably a dozen similar incidents.
In Barstow, California, we took Rte. 58 westward, turning north at Four Corners onto 395, where the 40-mph headwinds became 40-mph crosswinds.
Our initial destination was Lone Pine, California, where Malon had another friend, Cliff, with whom he was going to stay. After a couple more engine shutdowns from overheating, we finally reached Lone Pine at roughly 1:30 a.m. Monday morning. We were both exhausted – Malon from packing the truck, me from packing the truck too and doing all the driving. I slept in the truck.
On the way up to Lone Pine, Malon. who knows this area very well, kept telling me of the presence of the Sierra Mountains just to the west. Driving north on 395, I could dimly discern their outline against the night sky, but it was not until I awoke again around 6:30 a.m. that I saw the true magnificence of this mountain range. Right in front me in Lone Pine was Mt. Whitney, snow-covered at the top and towering over 14,000 feet high.
I spent some time chatting with Cliff and taking pictures of the mountains. Cliff needed a ride up to the town of Bishop, 50 miles north, so around 8:30 he and I got going. On the way up, we passed one of the concentration camps where the U.S. government, with the craven approval of the Supreme Court, had imprisoned Japanese-American citizens during World War II. We also had a good conversation about the logic of the “God concept.” Logically, God has to be either all, some, or none of reality. If She is all, then this seems to lead to a logically self-consistent position of pantheism, which, however, classical Western theism rejects in favor of a transcendental deity. Moreover, if God is only some of reality, then She cannot be the Supreme Being, as classical Western theology would try to have us believe, for the sum of God-reality plus the rest of reality would always be greater than God-reality alone. There have been many interesting developments in 20th century philosophical theology, including concepts of a social, naturalistic, and concrete deity that follow from the thinking of people such as Gurdjieff, Alfred North Whitehead, and Whitehead’s student Charles Hartshorne, among others. There are also developments in information theory, quantum information theory, and the physics of information that have deep theological implications in terms of how the universe “knows what to do” when it “follows the laws of physics.”
After dropping Cliff off in Bishop, I ate breakfast at a Taco Bell and then stopped briefly at the local K-Mart to get a decent lock for the truck's rear door -- where I accidentally encountered Cliff again. Small town, small world!
The pleasant trip to Bishop did not prepare me, however, for what was coming. Almost as soon as I got out of Bishop, there was a steep, long grade on 395 toward what is called Sherwin Summit at over 8800 feet. This is actually a climb up the side of a super-volcano. The truck started overheating no matter how slowly I tried to go up the hill. I had to stop two or three times and let the engine cool down. At one point, a friendly highway patrolman came by, and I assured him that everything was OK and that I just needed some time for the engine to cool. He assured me, in return, that this hill was the steepest and worst that I would encounter. I was relieved to hear this. But would it turn out to be true? As seekers of the truth, we should always remember that the mere saying of X, no matter who says it, cannot make X true.
Fortunately, in terms of cooling the engine, a rather fierce little storm then came through the area from the west, first with rain, then with sleet, and then with hail and spit. It covered the ground and the highway with about an inch of snow, although I myself was covered with only a T-shirt and shorts. Little had I counted on a snowstorm! With the frigid air, I had a bit less of a problem with the engine.
I finally got to the top of Sherwin Summit and continued north. In general, everything went fairly well as long as the terrain was flat or sloping downhill, but the minute I had to go uphill, the truck would have to crawl along at like 10 or 15 mph. These grades are very deceptive. They are long and even, and so they can seem to be almost flat, but they aren't. Probably also, the high altitude had some effect on the truck's performance.
There’s a lot of interesting geothermal geology around here, but I had no time to explore it.
The Sierra scenery, of course, was totally awesome. I had never seen the Sierras, at least that I clearly remember. Maybe I saw some of them as part of my family's trip out west in 1955, as I seem to remember Dad saying that we were driving up onto Mt. Whitney or some tall mountain. In any case, that was 55 years ago.
Finally, I got to Mono Lake, a highly salty lake with fascinating rock formations, and I stopped and took some roadside pictures. Again, however, there was a long, steep, twisting hill coming up out of it to what is called Conway Summit. My map did not adequately alert me to the character of this grade, and this indeed was the worst climb that I encountered on the trip. The patrolman, a supposable authority on these issues, had indeed been wrong!
I had to stop at least five times to get up this hill, each time for at least half an hour to 45 minutes to let the engine cool down. The rest of the time, I was barely crawling.
After Conway Summit at Mono Lake, things got easier, but I also had to be very careful going down the slopes to put the engine in lower gears so as not to overheat the brakes.
In going down the slopes coming out of the Sierras, I realized that the same trip going in the other direction would have been physically (though not logically) impossible for this truck. In other words, the grades upward that one faces when coming from the north are steeper than those I encountered coming from the south. The truck would never have made it. (Of course the distinction between logical and physical possibility raised the question in my mind of just what do we mean by this word “physical” anyway. So much writing in religious circles makes a distinction between “physical” and “spiritual” without ever making clear what the difference, if any, actually is.)
After getting out of the Sierras, I drove that evening into Carson City, Nevada. I stopped there at a Wal-Mart, got some new clothing for my new Wal-Mart job in Hood River, and ate at the in-store McDonalds, which actually carried little peach pies in addition to the usual apple pies -- the first and as yet only time I have ever experienced such a thing. A spark of creativity in the jungles of corporate similitudes! Such a thing should not go unrewarded! I told the waitress to pass along my approval to the manager.
I then drove through, and then up and out of, Reno, Nevada --again a long hill with an engine shutdown. I stopped for a while north of Reno and thought of resting for the night, but after a brief snooze, I actually recovered some energy and felt like I could drive further. In addition, I was running already over as day late in terms of arriving in Portland. So, instead of spending the night there, I decided to keep driving. Staying on 395, I drove north through Susanville, finally stopping around 2:30 a.m. Tuesday at a roadside pullover north of Alturas to sleep inside the truck. The bright moon revealed a tantalizingly beautiful and interesting landscape, but, again, I had no time to explore it.
I awoke again around 6:30 a.m., after about 4 hours of sleep, and drove from Alturas to Tulelake and then into southern Oregon. In the southwest, far away, I could see a beautiful, pure white, snow-covered cone of some volcano, which, looking now at the map, I guess was Mt. Shasta. I see now why so many people attribute some mystical presence to it.
This region has a lot of rich agricultural land, much of it under irrigation. There are also occasional smaller volcanoes and lava beds (e.g., Lava Beds National Monument).
Taking 39 north, I went through Klamath Falls and then north on Rte. 97 along the shore of Upper Klamath Lake. A lot of timber cutting goes on in this area. I stopped and ate in the town of Chemult.
A little past Chemult, I took Rte. 59 and headed west toward Eugene. It was here that the only other major highway incident occurred.
For some reason, Yahoo Maps had taken me to Portland out of Klamath Falls via the "scenic route,” that is, over a mountain range. Going up wasn’t too bad, but in the midst of coming down out of these mountains, I stopped at one point alongside a stream to admire its rushing rapids and to take some pictures. In getting back into the truck and starting the engine, however, I saw that the brake lights came on but would not go out, and the brake in fact seemed squishy. I waited half an hour, thinking maybe the problem was that the brakes had overheated. In starting up the truck several times, however, the same brake light problem appeared. The manual under the driver seat said this meant that the brakes needed emergency service. I tried to find an emergency phone number, but apparently we had put the truck rental documents with the emergency number not in the cabin of the truck but in the back of the truck in a box, as I discovered only later. Of course, in trying to call my friend Steve Blair to alert him of the situation, I found that in the middle of this wilderness, there was no cell phone service anyway.
At this point, I got a bit concerned. I was on a twisty, narrow, two-lane road with a fairly steep downslope and with more downslope ahead. If indeed the brakes were not functional, I could easily lose control of the truck and crash.
Seeing another pullover a few hundred feet down the road, at last I cautiously moved out onto the road. Keeping the truck in low gear, I drove down to this next turnout, repeatedly applying the brakes. They did in fact work, and the brake lights on the dashboard went out and no longer displayed their warning signal. Phew! A major relief!
The rest of the driving was basically uneventful except for the beauty of the scenery. I would love to retrace this whole trip with lots of leisure time to explore everything.
Finally, I reached Eugene and then the Portland area. After getting lost in Milwaukie trying to find Steve’s house, I finally arrived at maybe 5:30 p.m. -- too late, unfortunately, I learned by cell phone, to drop off the car trailer at the designated drop-off place, despite what the rental agency had previously told me.
Therewith began the next phase of the ordeal.
Steve lives off a circular cul-de-sac at the bottom of a downward slope. I had left the truck parked out on the main road and had walked over to his house to see whether the truck and car would have enough space to get out if I drove it down into the cul-de-sac. I figured it did.
I was wrong. Probably my brain was addled from the long exertion of the trip.
I drove the truck into the cul-de-sac, and we got the car off the trailer and took a couple things out of the back of truck to put inside my room in Steve’s house. However, in trying to get out of the cul-de sac, there was not, after all, enough room to complete a circle. Thus there began a four-hour nightmare of trying to back the truck up out of the cul-de-sac with the car trailer still attached.
First, I tried, with no real success. Again, the engine started to overheat. At one point, it conked out, and the truck started to roll down the slope of the cul-de-sac toward a house. Only my quick reaction of slamming on the emergency brake prevented a disaster.
Finally, my son, John Henry, arrived. I told him about the overheating problem and the need for the emergency brake if the engine failed. He felt confident that he could back the truck and trailer out, and he had some partial initial success, but the trailer kept jack-knifing. Again, the engine kept overheating, and once he, too, had to slam on the emergency brake.
Finally, around 8:30 p.m., Luke Tarr, another person living at Steve's, came along. After several efforts, including the overheating problem, he finally got the truck and trailer out of the cul-de-sac.
It was now like 9:30 p.m. John Henry and I took the truck and trailer over to a local shopping mall and parked it there for the night.
Wednesday morning, I drove the truck and trailer over to the drop off location and dropped off the trailer. I then drove the truck out to Hood River, paid the rent on the storage unit I had pre-arranged for there, and began to unload it. In the early afternoon, John Henry arrived, and we got as much as we could out of the truck and into a 10x10 unit and an adjacent 5x8 unit. We worked into the night. There was still a lot of stuff left in the truck, however, including the LP records and CDs that I was giving to John Henry.
Around 10:00 p.m., having stuffed the two storage units, we then drove to John Henry's apartment in Portland, 60 miles away. We indeed found room on the street to park the truck, but, in trying to park the truck a bit closer to the curb, the upper right corner of the 12-foot high roof snagged a tree limb and tore the plastic. I knew I had paid and signed for some kind of insurance on the truck and hoped that I would not have to pay a huge amount of money for the damage. (Fortunately, this turned out to be true.) Totally numb from exhaustion, I spent the night at John Henry's place, after first meeting his very lovely Honduran girlfriend Angela.
Thursday morning, we cleared away some space in John Henry's garage and unloaded the records and CDs. In the early afternoon, we then drove over Steve's and started unloading the rest of the boxes into his garage and my bedroom. John Henry helped tremendously but had to leave around 1:00 p.m. for a job of some kind. Exhausted, I slowly finished the rest of the unpacking, resting often in the rocking chair I had brought with me.
I finally finished around 4:30 p.m. and then drove the truck back to the drop-off location, arriving just before its closing time. The truck was supposed to have been back by Tuesday. I had to pay $200 for the extra two days of rental. It would have been $300 if I had not pushed myself as hard as I did.
John Henry drove over and met me at the rental company, and we then drove over to my car at the mall, and I drove it back to Steve's.
The ordeal was over -- temporarily.
Friday morning, I drove out to Hood River and started working at Wal-Mart. I arrived back late, like around 10:00 p.m., and, in an effort to get Steve and Ann the rest of their rent money, I tried to drive down to a Chase bank in Milwaukie. However, the ATM would not read my card. Then, in trying to find my way back home, I got lost. I stopped and pulled over by the side of a road to look for street signs and to try to get oriented. Suddenly – wham! Out of nowhere, my car was hit from behind by a young woman in an SUV. My trunk door was dented, and the right rear bumper and tail light plastic was smashed, although the lights still worked.
The woman had gotten distracted lighting her cigarette.
Smokers! What’s not to love about them!
Fortunately, she was not going very fast, and outside of being stunned psychologically, I was not apparently injured.
"Wow! Welcome to Oregon!" I thought to myself.
I also worked Saturday at Wal-Mart in Hood River, which is 60 miles from where I live in Milwaukie.
Sunday, I relaxed, slept in, and visited in the afternoon with Kendra, John Henry, Miles, and my grandson Maxwell, who is very cute and usually very quiet. It is interesting to watch where his attention goes. Interestingly, at first, he seemed not to notice me, even when I was right next to someone whom he did notice.
Kendra fixed a very spicy curry, which, unfortunately, had a later mega-laxative effect. But it sure tasted good going in!
I worked again Monday and Tuesday at Wal-Mart. Half of the staff and the customers are Latino – something I had not expected. It turns out that 12 percent of Oregon’s entire population is Latino and the percentage is growing rapidly. The customers are friendly and much more generous, I noticed, than people in Arizona in terms of making contributions to the Children’s Miracle Network, one of the medical charities that Wal-Mart supports.
Tuesday after work, I drove around Hood River a bit. Parts of it have some very beautiful older homes and huge old trees. It is also a year-round international tourist attraction. There are wind surfing in the summer and skiing in the winter. There are also hiking, camping, river-boating, train rides to Mt. Hood, lots of shops and boutiques, and beautiful waterfalls and awesome towering cliffs and mountains, including two major volcanoes, Mt. Adams and Mt. Hood. There are also orchards for many kinds of fruits and vegetables and nurseries for all kinds of flowers. In short, it is almost idyllic.
Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday I was free. In general, I will be working three days and having the other four off. It’s a Social Security restriction. I can earn only up to $1000 per month and still keep my Disability payments -- until I retire at age 66, after which time I can move to Wall Street, earn billions in the global financial casino, and still get my Social Security payments. Go figure.
Wednesday I really just relaxed --my first full day of relaxation since this whole moving ordeal began back in March.
Thursday morning, I visited an old college friend of mine, Erica Toussaint, who is now on the National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha'is in the US. We talked for almost 5 hours. We also listened to Obama's talk on the Middle East, which I found mildly encouraging.
Erica’s explanations of the unfolding progress being made in the Baha’i community in the US and worldwide renewed my hope that this Faith, which claims the status of genuine revelation in fulfillment of global prophecy about the “Kingdom on Earth” (or as many are now starting to say, “Earth Community”) is indeed what it claims to be. I had come across the Baha’i Faith as a child and had actually become a Baha’i in college, thanks to Erica and Steve.
I had in recent years drifted away from optimism about theistic religious thinking, but Erica’s helping me to see things differently. Gurdjieff and Bennett, and even Einstein, clearly believed in forms of higher intelligence, and Bennett’s student Tony Blake, too, particularly as influenced by physicist David Bohm’s notion of the “implicate order.”
But can we really allow ourselves to think of this higher intelligence as personal, as consciously intending? Within Bennett’s cosmology, and certainly within the Baha’i framework, we can, at least as a kind of philosophical shorthand. After all, what, anyway, is a person? A person, like any living system, can be described, to at least a very substantial degree, by a theory of cybernetic processes involving matter, energy, and information. As Daniel Dennett, Paul and Patricia Churchland, and many other neurophilosophers and neuroscientists are telling us, our behavior as persons is effected by impersonal neural circuitry and by tiny impersonal brain cells operating individually in total ignorance of a “John Dale.” In fact, the word “person” comes from the Latin persona, which meant mask. Persons are masks that are generated by impersonal processes and that have contributed to our (temporary) evolutionary success. At some point during childhood, as psychologists have studied, the process becomes self-referential and “conscious.”
So maybe the universe, with its subject/object distinction, is like a Moebius Strip, a geometrical figure that, as a totality, has only one side but which, at any given part or point, has two sides: the personal and the impersonal.
I dislike this word “higher,” but if we allow ourselves to think in terms of a personal “higher” or more deeply informed and coherent intelligence, and if we think for a minute, we can see that it stands to reason that any real personal God or Higher Intelligence would have sent intentional, “personal” guidance to humanity strategically well in advance of the 20th century. It was precisely in the late 19th century, when Baha’u’llah was receiving revelation, that humanity’s unselfchecked nationalistic and militaristic tendencies were beginning to crystalize into the forces that generated the two World Wars in the 20th century. Baha’u’llah wrote to the political leaders of the late 19th century warning them precisely to avoid this tendency and to unite in a collective security arrangement. As part of this, the revelation also established, as a model within the Baha’i community itself, a set of institutions for improved, dialogic human self-government.
This indeed is what the Baha’i community offers – self-refining patterns and methods of self-government at every level from the individual to the global.
In recent books, such as Revelation and Social Reality by Paul Lample, a member of the Baha’i Universal House of Justice, and The Forces of Our Time by Hooper Dunbar, the vision of this unfolding revelation-based process of self-government is depicted with greater clarity and sophistication than I have ever seen before. I sincerely specifically recommend these two books to everyone’s attention.
We should not make the mistake of underestimating our personal potentialities in this epoch of human history. We should not lose sight of the planetary and even cosmic whole of high-level transformation in the midst our exercises of earnestly sensing our bodies part by part. But neither should we simply “lose ourselves” in some form of “higher imagination.” The two levels of awareness – bodily and critical-conceptual -- work together synergistically.
I assure you: we are not simply the impotent little individuals that so much of our religious and psychological culture tells us we are.
Become heroes! If you’re going to be a theist, go the whole hog including the postage, and grasp God’s future with both hands. Stop clinging to past religions! Really! They once were real, but the future requires a new, concrete framework of self-reference and new processes of group decision-making -- frameworks and processes that these past religions only hinted at. To use the Biblical metaphor, in previous Revelations, we have seen through a glass darkly. Now it is possible to see clearly. And what we see in front of us is a set of frightfully dangerous global problems in urgent need of enlightened solutions that require a global unanimity of will in order to succeed. We need the psychological maturity of the human race, and we need it quickly, and the Baha’i patterns and methods of self-government help supply us move toward that maturity.
* * *
Thursday night my son John Henry and his girlfriend Angela, my daughter Kendra and her partner Miles, and -- surprise! – their mother and my ex-wife Georgia all got together for dinner at John Henry's apartment in Portland.
Apparently, both John Henry and Kendra thought that the other had mentioned Georgia's arrival. I had no clue she was going to be visiting. In any case, we had a warm and friendly family reunion.
Friday, May 20, I mostly relaxed and got together with John Henry in the early evening, lending him my last remaining money to save him from being evicted from his apartment. He has struggled and struggled to find decent and steady work here. He finally has a possible two-week stint of legal video-taping at $250 per day. But he is still looking for something permanent and full-time. Hopefully, some of his recent job interviews with the Regional Arts Council will lead to some relief from his “starving artist” situation.
Saturday, May 21, the day designated by some nationally famous Christian minister as assuredly the precise day of the Rapture, I worked again at Wal-Mart. The real Rapture, as little as most Christians imagine, is a rapture of justice on Earth. The “144,000” who are to be raptured, according to the New Testament, is a symbol for the number 9 (i.e., 1 + 4 + 4 = 9). The number 9 is, in turn, a reference (in the decimal system) to the concept of a completing cycle, to rebirth and renewal, and thus to the enneagram, and, in the enneagram psychology of types, to the concept of the peacemaker, balancer, and harmonizer. Nine is also, along with 19, a symbolic number in the Baha’i revelation.
Sunday, as one of those who, for better or worse, were "left-behind," I organized some of my boxes at Steve's. My time since then has mostly been doing the same thing: working and organizing to renew my activities in my new environment.
In general, I am enjoying Hood River and the Columbia Gorge. It’s a long commute to work, and I may need to deal with this problem during the upcoming winter, but it is awesomely beautiful.
My grandson Maxwell is usually, as I mentioned, very quiet. I’ll send some pictures shortly. It’s amazing to watch the gradual formation and crystallization of this new being here on the Earth, his attention touching down from time to time into the “world of objects” and then departing again for a more formless realm. It’s a concrete illustration of the concept of “worlds” in the Work, particularly as Bennett elaborated it in his systematic thinking on will and relatedness in Volume 2 of The Dramatic Universe.
I have a lot of work to do in order to finish my book Launching Dates for the Voyage to Earth Community and to organize myself here. I will be in touch with one or another of the Gurdjieff groups here in the near future and will definitely be more active with the Baha’is.
Just as Gurdjieff focused on consciously balancing and harmonizing ourselves internally as individuals in order for us to become able to reflect upon and deal consistently with an increasingly chaotic environment, so too the Baha’i (meaning “radiant”) teachings work toward the same aim. In the latter case, however, there are institutions that channel our attention toward problem solving and self-government at social levels as well, and there are special provisions (the Most Great Covenant) to prevent unity from crystallizing into disunities.
It has struck me before, and it strikes me again now, that Gurdjieff, given his many travels around the Middle East in the late 1800s and his omnivorous and essence-seeking explorations into the multitude of modern and ancient religious phenomena in that area, could not possibly have been unaware of the Babi and Baha’i revelations and movements. Yet, he never (as far as I know) openly mentions them.
Instead, he develops the myth or metaphor of the Sarmoun (or Sarman) Brotherhood (a “universal” brotherhood exactly analogous to the universal, world-integrative level of the Baha’i revelation) and focuses on a more detailed, concentrated approach to personal inner growth than is revealed in the Baha’i writings.
This approach, nevertheless, when set into the broader Baha’i context and seen as preliminary and scientifically supplementary to it, can help a Baha’i make a greater, more freely chosen, and more mature contribution to the building of Earth Community. The Fourth Way and the “Work,” as they have come to be called, can be seen as a pre-school for developing self-government at the individual level—a “first conscious shock” that, in turn, must be followed and fulfilled by a deeper “second conscious shock” as individuals integrate themselves into self-correcting processes of self-education and self-government at broader and broader levels of social and planetary “being-responsibility.”
Even the word “Sarmoun” has a relevant significance. In, I think, his book Gurdjieff: Making a New World, or possibly his book Gurdjieff: A Very Great Enigma, John G. Bennett connects the word “Sarmoun” (or “Sarmān”) etymologically to the activity of bees, which is, of course, to make honey, that is, a “sweetness.” Any reader of the Baha’i writings will very soon notice the many references to sweetness, as in the following quote from the writings of Baha’u’llah:
“Beseech ye the one true God to grant that ye may taste the savor of such deeds as are performed in His path, and partake of the sweetness of such humility and submissiveness as are shown for His sake. Forget your own selves, and turn your eyes towards your neighbor. Bend your energies to whatever may foster the education of men. Nothing is, or can ever be, hidden from God. If ye follow in His way, His incalculable and imperishable blessings will be showered upon you. This is the luminous Tablet, whose verses have streamed from the moving Pen of Him Who is the Lord of all worlds. Ponder it in your hearts, and be ye of them that observe its precepts.
(Baha'u'llah, Gleanings from the Writings of Baha'u'llah, p. 9)
In fact, the online Ocean Reference Library of the world’s scriptures, including the Baha’i writings, lists over 300 references to the word “sweetness” in the Baha’i writings. Sweetness, as opposed to sourness or bitterness, is, in fact, one of the criteria in the Baha’i writings of positive spiritual work. This spiritual/material relationship is written, of course, into our very DNA and should come as no surprise, as sugar in our biological metabolism is our primary source of energy and life.
Is this all just coincidence? Possibly, but, to me, the “integrative complementarity” of the relationship between Gurdjieff’s specifically tailored forms of inner Work and the more general and publically accessible Baha’i writings feels almost like a conscious high-level decision and division of labor. Both the Baha’i revelation and Gurdjieff’s “fragments of an unknown teaching” represent new material, new information that is not just recycled from previous available sources such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam. Thus in a sense, both represent revelations, although Gurdjieff is careful to avoid calling his work a revelation, which he could easily have done if he had been inwardly so disposed.
In any case, the Baha’i teachings proclaim their harmony with scientific and with rational efforts to progressively understand the specifics of our universal interconnectedness and interdependence. Thus, any illumination that Gurdjieff’s work or anyone else’s work can throw onto human psychology and its connectedness with our cosmic and biospheric environment can help the Baha’i and Earth Community effort. The two things, Gurdjieff’s teachings and the Baha’i teachings, must be kept distinct and not subjectively “mish-mashed” into one thing; yet the two efforts and their discourses and sets of data potentially complement, inform, and synergize one another.
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Let me conclude by saying that the radio stations here in Portland are great! There is an all-classical-music station. There’s another National Public Radio station that is really progressive and much more astute than the NPR we had in Prescott. There’s a third progressive, listener-supported, local community station, KBOO that has Democracy Now and lots programs of local interest, some of which are in Spanish (a language that I now want to begin to focus on). There are probably more stations that I have not yet discovered. But, wow!
Plus, there’s Powell’s Book Store! Yummee! ;-))))))
Anyway, love and encouragement to all!
John
