An Almost Anonymous Informal Note

I do not wish to offend or threaten anyone’s faith in any way. That, as you know or will learn, is not because I am unwilling to hurt people’s feelings, if their need is sufficiently urgent. Nor do I think that the point of faith is that it is expressed in good social behavior.

Good social behavior is the result of normal maturity. As one matures, one learns to deal with hate, greed and love, probably in that sequence.

Hate, anger, wish to destroy, punish or eliminate is always with us. Neitzche, I think, went so far as to say that human motivation can be reduced to fear and lust for power, and the only fear is loss of power. That is more a logical card trick than on observation about people. It has nothing to do with being human. Any system in the contemporary universe that makes choices must systematically defend the option of continuing to make choices. Not even self-awareness is required. A tree has a "choice" of sorts as to where to grow the most leaves. It will grow them in the direction of the light, thus gaining access to more power, which will permit further growth. Should something threaten our sense of power, we react against it. So do not expect the hate mode, the punishing mode to go away any time soon.

Greed, desire the ability to enjoy what we have and to want some things that we do not have, is a step upward. Someone once said they wanted the courage to change what they could, the grace to accept what they could not change, and the wisdom to know the difference. Courage, grace and wisdom are very nice, but the person who made that statement obviously did not like one single solitary thing about their life. I wish that person the wisdom to notice there are some good things in life, the courage to accept them and the grace to share them.

Love is the perception in another of that which one understands to be the best in oneself. What one loves one nurtures and with much the same care that one defends one's own power. This is the nurturing mode. No human social order can survive without it. So it should take no order from any supernatural power to behave in a nurturing fashion at least part of the time. Anything else is an immature, diseased in fact. Nor does it take a supernatural power to punish failure to mature. Fail to nourish what you care about, and it may be lost. If few enough in a society act in a nurturing fashion, that society will be lost. Maturity is a basic biological function.

Religion is not "about" nurturing (not all religion's anyway), although like art, sex, communication and a lot of other things, religion may serve as an occasion for love, just as it can be an occasion for hate or greed. Some religions are about love, but every religion is about what you are. And you are, in fact, an immortal. More about that later.

Even if you prefer (and I can certainly understand it if you do) to doubt you have an infinite future, you still need to hold onto your religion and the religion of your ancestors. One reason is hybrid infertility. Like other animals and plants, humans suffer a decrease in fertility if they hybridize - if two different hereditary lines mate. This is expressed, not usually in the first generation but in later generations. Since humans are relatively infertile as plants and animals go, this places a potentially insupportable burden on generations that follow cross breeding. Religion is one of a number of ways people keep their hereditary lines straight. Abandoning organized religions would do the kind of damage to the gene pool we generally expect from a nuclear war.

Learn that well, it is the second most important thing you will ever learn. The most important thing, we will get around to later. But if you doubt me, stop right now. Some things I say may be offensive. And I will not be responsible for someone doubting their faith… are they gone? It’s just us? A handful of brothers and sisters sworn to hold onto what we believe and care about no matter what? And you will not use anything here as a weapon against anyone's faith. Promise? Good.

New Age is a style, a fashion. It’s sort of like you might say "country and western." Walk into a country style dance hall, and people may look at you as if to say, "You don’t look like a cowboy (or girl) to me." And they can do that. There is no one to enforce a rule that says, "Cowboys are always friendly." There is also no rule that says what you have to look like.

Similarly, in New Age style, you can believe, you can buy into what you want and no more. For instance, a fairly common New Age sentiment goes something like, "Once the emerging spiritual awakening has happened, organized religions will disappear." You know how I feel about that one.

I first became aware of New Age through music. I had an electronic keyboard, and among the choices of tone (what we would have called "stops" on a pipe organ) was one entitled "New Age." I tried it. It sounded quite peasant. There is, in fact, a whole section of the music store with New Age as its title. An artist named "Enya" is my favorite in that section, although many of her fans declare that she is not really new age; she is in her own category. I see no problem there.

The first piece of music I heard that sounded New Age to me was a collection called, "As Falls Wichita, So Fall Wichita Falls." Friends assure me that it is really jazz, not New Age. Again I see no difficulty with differing opinions. At all events the music is pleasant, melodious, harmonious, original, intense and I like it, so I was well disposed toward New Age before I began to hear much about it.

New Age is a Christian movement. There, I’ve said it. We are approaching the year two thousand, and two thousand is a round number. So people think it’s important. Well, the number is supposed to be related to the time of a man called Jesus, meaning it is about two thousand years since his life among us. But why just two thousand years? Wouldn’t one thousand have been more interesting, or the year 7777 or 777 if you think sevens are somehow important? The old Babylonian number system was, I think, based on 60, which is a nice fraction of 360, which is about the number of days in a year, and they made it number of degrees in a circle, and a degree is about the amount of sky the sun takes up and – coincidentally – the moon, too.

120 degrees is the number of degrees in each angle of an equilateral triangle. The 120-degree angle is important in astrology. Now I have little time for astrology, if nothing else because the precession of the equinoxes has thrown the whole thing out of kilter, but there is no denying that astrology is a very old practice. And in astrology, when two planets as seen from the earth are just 120 degrees apart, they are in "trine," and that is said to be a very good thing. So why two thousand? Why not 120?

Those versed in astrology, by the way, say that there IS an astrological significance to the idea of a millenium. The precession of the equinoxes is the equivalent of saying that the earth wobbles very slowly. The geographical North Pole does not always point at Polaris, the North Star. The direction the North Pole points describes a circle in the sky over thousands of years. Astrologers divide the sky into twelve segments called "houses." We are more or less in the process of moving from one house to another. They keep track of it as the place in the sky where the sun is located at a particular time of year, but it really means the same thing. I am unable to identify a sharp boundary between "houses" in the night sky, so I am not impressed by the importance of transitions between houses.

Let’s look at the positive side of expecting a millenium. This man Jesus once said, relative to something else, "A day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as a day." Well, the Bible states the man was executed, and it is believed that after three days he arose. There is an old belief that during those three days he went into hell and collected all the souls of good people who were down there, the "harrowing of hell." It has been believed that Jesus was necessary for salvation, so if you were born too soon, guess what your chances were. I think it's a pity that the idea is unacceptable to so many. Can you imagine the movie? Can you imagine the special effects?

If he was down there three days, and a day is as a thousand years, then he was down there three days. If he is ever coming back, it should be around the year three thousand. But be careful. The three days is by Roman counting. They always counted the day something started as the first day.

I mean he was executed on Friday and arose on Sunday. Friday, Saturday, Sunday: that’s three days, right? Wrong. It’s two days. Friday to Saturday is one day. Saturday to Sunday is another day. That’s two days. So by that reckoning, he should return two thousand years after the crucifixion. We are now about the two thousandth anniversary of his birth. The Second Coming is not for some decades yet (again by that reckoning), but it is close enough to think about. The anniversary of the birth is only approximately known, but the anniversary of the crucifixion is well established; there was an eclipse the next morning, not in Jerusalem, but in Babylon, where the observatory was.

The book of the Bible that speaks most specifically about the millenium, the end of time, about the judgment day, about the day when the graves will open and the dead will rise, that book is the Revelation of Saint John. The book contains a passage to the effect that there will be a great star, burning like a lamp, that will fall and make the waters of the earth bitter, so that many people will die of it. And the name of the star will be "wormwood." And the reactor in the Ukraine that burned some years back and released the radiation that killed so many was named Chernobyl. Chernobyl is Ukrainian for "wormwood." Later, a pit will open and "locusts" come out with the sting of a scorpion, with the sound of their wings like the sound of chariots and many horses running to battle, and although they will not be very deadly, they will torment people. Scud missiles launched by Iraq? Who can say?

But in order to make anything out of this, you need to take the Bible as literally true and then push the interpretation. "Literally true"? Is it? Could it be? Let’s tackle the Bible on one of its strong points, genealogy. If anything is true, the gospels must be. Luke tends to be a poet. John tends to conflict with the others. Mark is obviously in a hurry. Mathew is the most dependable. And he starts out with a good old genealogy. Mathew 1: 1-16 gives us:

1 Abraham

2 Isaac

3 Jacob

4 Judas

5 Phares

6 Esrom

7 Aram

8 Aminadab

9 Naasson

10 Salmon

11 Booz

12 Obed

13 Jesse

14 David

15 Solomon

16 Roboam

17 Abia

18 Asa

19 Josaphat

20 Joram

21 Ozias

22 Joatham

23 Achaz

24 Ezekias

25 Manasses

26 Amon

27 Josias

28 Jechonias = captivity

29 Salathiel

30 Zorobabel

31 Abiud

32 Eliakim

33 Azor

34 Sadoc

35 Achim

36 Eliud

37 Eleazar

38 Matthan

39 Jacob

40 Joseph

41 Jesus

with Jechonias marking the carrying away into Babylon.

Then verse 17 reads: "So all the generations from Abraham to David are fourteen generations; and from David until the carrying away into Babylon are fourteen generations; and from the carrying away into Babylon unto Christ are fourteen generations"… really?

Let’s see: with Roman counting I get fourteen generations to David. Properly counted it would be thirteen, but no matter. Then to get to Jehonias, I take fourteen generations, but by Roman counting it should be fifteen. We have changed counting systems in mid sentence. Then I take fourteen more by Roman counting to get to Jesus, thirteen properly. Well I can accept one change in counting, but changing back? Sorry, no. The count is off, that’s all. And if the Bible is in error in a single passage, in error right up front where all can see, what are we to think about things we can’t possibly verify?

It’s sort of like the guy who comes to your door and offers to sell you a silver ball that he is holding, and he will mail a gold ball to you tomorrow. You look at the ball he is holding. It is tin. You probably won’t have much faith in the gold ball that he knows you can’t verify.

Of course in the Bible, the answer is redundancy. You don’t accept anything unless you are told it more than once. That is an old Egyptian writing technique and an old Mesopotamian poetic device. If it is important, say it more than one way. But literal, gospel truth, so to speak. I am sorry; it isn’t really there for you. An honest attempt at the truth? I think so, but not supernaturally, literally true. No, I am not challenging your faith. You promised me on that one. But I am looking; and you should look at any article of faith.

Consider the Confederate Army, one of the finest fighting forces ever. The typical confederate soldier was loyal to Robert E. Lee. They were fond of Lee, called him uncle, called him old man. The soldiers knew Lee was not perfect. The soldier knew that anything Lee accomplished was done through the efforts of soldiers such as himself. Yet the soldiers fought with tremendous dedication and resolve under Lee’s orders. They used their own wits and cunning to accomplish tasks he put them to. Be like that. Put all your cunning and all your resolve into sustaining and improving your religion. If someone points out a contradiction, try to resolve it. If you cannot accept a point, try persuading others to join you. But a contradiction is no more excuse for desertion than battle. And like a battle, a contradiction should engage your entire attention.

One of the New Age notions is renewed interest in a venerable heresy, namely that Jesus actually married Mary Magdalene at the wedding where he changed water into wine or substituted water for wine. He then had a son, who was born after the crucifixion and who came with his mother to France. The "Holy Grail" is then taken to be the bloodline descending from that person. I first heard this in a hushed whisper from someone far more steeped in New Age thinking than I. The relevant book was, I think, Holy Blood. Holy Grail.

Taking as given the survival of male offspring of, we are immediately faced with the question of the Y chromosome. The Y chromosome in the human is what makes a male a male. It is passed only from father to son. So if there was a virgin birth, where did the Y chromosome come from? The book says it came from Joseph and gives its own reasoning for this. It seems plausible, as Joseph was husband of Mary (the Virgin, not the Magdelene). At all events, Mathew is at some pains in effect to trace the Y chromosome and to count generations. Many Old Testament passages also trace the Y chromosome. So let us do some counting.

Start the count with a man named Saint Arnulf. I know little enough about Arnulf except he was grandfather of Pepin the Fat, who was the great grandfather of Charlemagne, of whom you may have heard, a very powerful king of the Franks. Pepin’s son, Charles Martel, established in France a homeland for the Jews. (This, of course, was a long time ago.) Of course, it wouldn’t be "France" until the Franks conquered it, which was after Arnulf’s time. Another thing I rather suspect is that Arnulf’s wife was a woman of great personal force and energy, not to mention intelligence and imagination. No evidence, sorry, except that she was known as "Saint Begga." Now let us track the Y chromosome.

Well, in fact we can’t trace the Y chromosome directly. We have to make some assumptions: The Old Testament genealogies are correct. New Testament genealogies are correct. Historical documents are correct. And a "well established heresy" (that means I didn’t just make it up) called the Arian heresy holds that Christ had offspring, and that heresy is correct and has been correctly reported to us. We have to believe all of these things at the same time, so if you are skeptical, I shan’t take it personally.

Call Arnulf generation 75. There is no significance to the round number - just a meaningless coincidence. Counting generations forward, we reach Charlemagne at generation 80, which is another meaningless coincidence. Counting backward by tens, we reach someone named "Clodion of Tournai" at generation 70. Going on back, we reach Jesus at generation 60, which is the coincidence that interests us.

If you speak English, you know who Jesus was. There are about a billion people in the world today who try to follow his teachings. This is not a man to be ignored. Whether or not he married Mary Magdelene, it is clear the two were very fond of each other. You remember the story that one day he came in tired, dusty and footsore. Mary Magdalene broke a container of perfume over his feet and dried the feet off with her hair. Now let me tell you, there is a woman with class. There is a creature with a sense of style. There is a female who can stun males over a two thousand-year gulf, much as Jesus has inspired over the same distance.

Now Jesus during his ministry was enormously popular. We have substantial scriptural evidence of that. But when he was executed, he left behind a handful of followers, who were dispirited, scattered, scared and in no mood to draw attention to themselves. Again, there is solid scriptural support for this, and it certainly seems plausible.

Then SOMETHING happened.

Well, I am Christian myself, so I will go with the biblical account and say there was a resurrection. But look for a moment at the cast of characters. Saturday night: Three grieving women (Mary the Virgin, Mary the mother of John and Mary the Magdelene), two Roman soldiers and one corpse. Sunday morning: Two Roman soldiers sound asleep, no corpse and joyous women shouting, "He is risen." You assignment is to discuss the question, could three women secure the cooperation of two Roman soldiers? For extra credit, complete the question: "Could two suitably motivated Roman soldiers…?" This is not, in fact, the angle adopted by the book Bloodline of the Holy Grail, but no matter. The point it that Mary Magdelene was a remarkable woman.

Going back to generation 50, we have a man named Abiud, whom I don’t know much about. Ozias at generation 40 does not ring bells either. At generation 30, we get Booz or Boas. You remember him. Nice guy. Married a woman named Ruth, whom you are more likely to remember. Do you get the drift? This Y chromosome we are following has a distinct tendency to be drawn to woman of force and mind. Boas was great grandfather to King David. Surely you remember David and Bathsheba. Same Y chromosome, same interest in strong women.

Generation 20 is Abraham, another meaningless coincidence. You do remember how often Abraham’s wife had to save Abraham’s life, of course. Generation 10 is Noah. Heard of him? Sorry. Another coincidence. O yes, generation 14 (ignore the sevens) is someone named "Eber." That name crops up in the family of Pepin the Fat, just in case you though we lost track of the family. And then generation 1 is Adam. That, of course is not a coincidence at all. I set it up so it would come out that way.

Adam, as you remember, was a man who would have been happy working in a garden his whole life. Then Eve decided to take a chance and to learn the difference between good and evil. The result was that Adam and Eve were banished. Adam himself was sort of a dud. It was Eve who was the firebrand, risk taker, thinker, darer, driver.

Finding Adam acting in line with the family tradition encourages one to think of him as a real human being, not some sort of mythical prototype. The only really strange things that happened to him (other than a remarkable long reported life span) happened before he was banished from the Garden of Eden. So where was this Garden? Perhaps it was England. Because at the time of Adam, allowing any reasonable generation time (and the generation times in the Bible are more plausible than the recorded life spans), at the time of Adam the land that would be England was in the full flower of its megalithic civilization. And the gardens of that time can be seen as changes in the soil even to this very day.

Once again, of course, we have the question of where the Y-chromosome came from. Did it come from the British Isles?

Before venturing further, let me remind you of the story of Job.

The story is that God and Satan made a bet. God was bragging about Job and how devout Job was. Satan took the attitude, "It’s all economic. Job is devout because he can afford it." Satan’s explanation has followers to this day, who will say that crime, drug use, gambling, divorce, violence and promiscuity are the effects rather than causes of poverty.

So the bet is struck and God wins; despite losing all his wealth, Job remains devout. Satan complains that Job still has a nice family; take them, and Job will curse God. And so it goes, with things getting worse and worse for poor Job. Job’s wife gives her advice, "Curse God and die." Then, as if things hadn’t gone down hill far enough, Job has four friends come over to provide comfort. Only they provide comfort for themselves, not Job. They take a position that is the opposite of Satan’s. Satan has said, "Principles are determined by money," and they say, "Money follows from principles," (a spirit that has not died yet either). Their attitude is, "Look Job. It must be your own fault. Really good people" (as they fancy themselves, we are to suppose) "never have rotten luck like you’re having." Eventually the comforters start to squabble among themselves; that is the last straw.

Job complains long and bitterly about his treatment at the hand of God. Eventually God gets fed up and says briefly, "Look, Job. Who do you think you’re talking to? I’m God. I can do anything. Look at the horse. Can you make a better one? Look at the whale. Can you make a pet of the thing? I can do anything. What right have you to complain?" Job responds, "O yes. I see. I’m sorry. I’m really, really sorry." God says, "Good, good. All right, here’s all your stuff back."

The book of Job is generally presented as "morally difficult." Stuff and nonsense. It is morally as clear as can be. God is being a jerk. The bottom line is supposed to be, you can’t judge God by human standards. But it doesn’t say that anywhere in the book of Job. On the contrary, Job does judge God by human standards and finds a real failure. God’s response is no answer at all. It’s just that Job is so intimidated by the show of power that he caves in. The giving of all the stuff back to Job is unconvincing. What about all Job’s children who were killed? Did they miraculously come back to life?

So where did Adam’s Y chromosome come from? Well, from God. So we are encouraged, the book of Job notwithstanding, to look at God as we would a human. And frankly, the Old Testament God is a mess. In Job, He is a boaster and a gambler, wasteful of life, unfair and a bully unable to defend His own actions when challenged. Elsewhere we see Him lie to Adam and Eve when He says eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil will kill them at once. He is selfish when He denies them immortality.

The Old Testament God is always trying to micro-manage everything, telling this person and that person what to do. Imagine a beekeeper who decides he wants clover honey and spends his day grabbing individual bees, carrying each to a clover blossom, sticking it in, taking the bee back to the hive and sticking it in there. I think he will get less honey from that hive than if he left it alone. He may get stung, and there are sure to be some really scared, unhappy bees. Well you and I are a lot closer mentally and physically to bees than we are to God (unless, perchance you worship a carbon based life form).

Old Testament God often loses His temper and kills people wholesale. He is jealous of human accomplishment at Babel. He mocks Moses by offering to moon him. He loses his temper and re-writes the Ten Commandments. He makes promises He can’t keep, and basically He just doesn’t know where He is going. After sixty generations of bitter, bloody struggle He has a handful of truculent Jews living in a scabby little Roman outpost placed like a pawn right next the enormously powerful Persian Empire. Nobody else has even heard of Him.

Then He met the Virgin. She was from Ephesus, where the best-preserved ancient library still stands. Ephesus was also the site of the Artemis temple, one of the great triumphs of the ancient world. Some say a pillar from the Artemis temple is in the Great Haggia Sophia, the Church of the Holy Wisdom, in Istanbul; others deny it. The amphitheater at Ephesus still looks down to the sea. Chartres, indeed every French gothic cathedral, was dedicated to the Virgin. We fancy we see her image here in Pinellas County. Mostly, the Roman Catholics remember her, but if you must know, there is many a staunch skeptical Protestant who will grow misty eyed at the mention of her name. This was God’s woman.

After He met her, He couldn’t fail. He had a message that was consistent, compelling, uplifting. He stepped back and let untold numbers of enthusiastic humans make the decisions and carry on the work. He stopped His lies, His boasts, His wholesale murders. Certainly His followers did all those things, but not on the same scale, not with the same mind-numbing predictability.

What does all this have with the New Age, with the millenium? Not much, except that Jesus was generation 60 after Adam. And we are now in generation 120. The human race is in trine. You remember what trine is.

Please do not take all that too seriously, of course. Nothing must shake your faith.

So with the millenium many think we might be on the brink of a new spirituality, of new spiritual insight? Might we?

New spirituality does make sense. Not that long ago, it was standard for writers to say, "O we have outgrown all that spirit stuff. It’s scientific law, now. We understand things better now." And we do understand things better. In Victorian times the European thinkers reached a sort of a zenith of trust in rationality. They still believed in God, but more than prior ages expected God not to intervene in human affairs. There was, of course, a reaction with mediums and "spiritualists" of various sorts plying their trades. Arthur Conan Doyle, who wrote the Sherlock Holmes tales among other things, took an interest in them. But spiritualists were the exception. An austere rationality, well foreshadowed by Edgar Allen Poe and lamented by him, took possession of the intellectual middle ground.

Then, around the turn of the century, rationality was abandoned. There are those who will tell you that the advent of the nuclear bomb and the horrors of Nazi domination of Europe were the cause, but in fact the anti-rational shift was already well under way by then. The rise of the Nazi’s may have been in part due to the abandonment of rational thinking by so many. Perhaps World War I was to blame, but there had been hideously bloody wars before.

I think it may have been the Spanish flu. In 1918 an influenza epidemic swept the world. The flu struck in the spring, no worse than a typical strain. Then it struck in the fall. Of those who had it in the spring, none caught it in the fall. Of those who caught it in the fall, the death rate was terrible. Older people tended to be spared so apparently the flu or one close to it had made its rounds before. Despite the enormous number of deaths, there is little mention of the disease. There has been a sort of community amnesia about it. M’s mother, who was known even by casual acquaintances for laughing death in the teeth, even she would lower her voice when she said "influenza": that word and no other. Within living memory, young people would commonly say, "What matters anyway? The A-bomb could wipe us out at any time." The A-bomb is something people control. The flu could not be controlled. It came, went, left more dead than any war had and remained a total mystery.

Despair was premature. The mystery of the flu remains, but only because we do not have the living virus to work with. If we had it, we could now analyze it to the point where we could learn the secret of its lethality, and we could know it at once if it returned, could be effectively prepared against it. We gave up on rationality too soon.

Another reason we gave up on rationality was because of a branch of physics called quantum mechanics. At tiny scales, it seems that the universe does not, to the best of our understanding, follow certain laws that would seem to be common sense: things, like "Something has to have one location or one description or not at any moment in time. It can’t go back and change what it was after the fact." Well, it seems like it can. But instead of saying, "To the best of our understanding this is what things are like," many physicists took the attitude, "This is what things are like; if you don’t like it, tough." Most days I think that, as with the flu, rationality has been abandoned too soon.

So technology advanced. We can build cars that are better for what we use a horse for than the horse that Job’s God was so proud of. We can make a pet of the whale that Job’s God said we could never tame. Advancing technology and science seemed to crowd out any need for religion to explain mysteries, so it was expected that religion should sort of fade away. Only it didn’t. Organized religions have suffered mostly because the leadership has bought into notions that religion is there to explain things better left to science or to get you to believe lies so you will do good things. The notion that religion was a vital part of the cultural distinctions that keep us from intermarrying and thus dying out from hybrid sterility seems to have escaped them. And the notion that there is something far more important than the survival of the species at stake seems to have escaped them sometimes as well.

Why do we expect a new spirituality? Think about this. Four and five thousand years ago, people were moving about enormous blocks of stone; blocks larger than we care to try to move now. I suppose for enough money we could create the technology, but we haven’t. It isn’t worth it.

Moving the stones probably wasn’t "worth it" then, either, although doing a cost-benefit analysis is difficult when you don’t really know what they expected the benefit to be. As a safeguard for a wealthy tomb, the pyramids failed - big stones and all. The also-very-old but much simpler tomb of Croesis, who was probably as rich as any pharaoh, stands unplundered. And it didn’t cost that much, either.

The oldest city in the world is Jerico, the one sacked by Joshua. There are brick walls around Jerico that antedate the oldest megalithic monuments. They knew how to make bricks. Why did they move those large stones? No, I don’t know, but it was obviously important to them. MOVING BIG CHUNKS OF MASS WAS VERY IMPORTANT. It was more important than it has ever been since. It was the age of matter.

Putting up heroic structures continues to be something that is pursued in defiance of cost and benefit considerations to this very day, but it started and reached it’s zenith thousands of years ago.

Then, some centuries ago, people began in earnest to harness power. It was the industrial revolution. It was the age of energy. Muscle power gave way to steam. Steam gave way to internal combustion. Combustion gave way to nuclear energy in certain applications at least for a while.

Think about what happened. Matter and energy are forms of the same thing, according to Einstein’s brilliant formulation E = MC². Energy is only a sort of more "abstract" form. Well, abstract is a poor word here. See if you can think of a better one.

The energy age reached its zenith with the use of the nuclear weapon. Although the mass age lasted a few thousand years, the energy age lasted a few hundred. It has now past. We do not expect to use nuclear weapons again, certainly never the largest of the past, and even nuclear reactors are less popular than they have been.

What we have entered is an information age. Information processing began in earnest with the introduction of the first practical desktop information processor by the Germans during World War II. It was called the Enigma cipher machine and was used to handle codes. The Enigma device failed spectacularly because the British stole one and figured it out. But it ushered in the information age.

Information and energy are forms of the same thing according to a formulation called "thermodynamics." It isn’t a simple formulation, but the bottom line is that information is a more abstract form of energy. Again, the word "abstract" leaves something to be desired, but go with it.

We have not yet reached the zenith of the information age. Information is being packed tighter and moved and processed faster than ever before in history. But the pace is breathtaking. If we go true to form, it seems entirely possible that we will have reached the zenith of the information age within a few decades of when we began.

What should we expect then? Well, what is a more abstract form of information if it is not spirit? But be warned, this impending age of spreading spiritual perception will not last long, maybe five or six years. Then what? It is too early to predict. In fact, even predicting this New Age is a difficult thing. But many do expect a new kind of spiritual awakening and growth, and it is a difficult thing to say it could not happen.

I will run over a few elements of New Age style that you may have heard of. If you want to hear more, look at the magazine Atlantis Rising, Box 441, Livingston MT 59047. I do not suggest you believe everything you read there. I would not even want you simply to believe everything I say. But I do want you to understand. If you understand, and what I say is true, I think you will take it into account. At all events, the magazine will present a far more balanced picture of this way of thinking that I.

The elements I will talk about are 1) Mysticism 2) Drugs 3) Herbs 4) Crystals 5) Harmony 6) Lines 7) Free energy 8) Atlantis 9) Gaia 10) Crop circles 11) the Goddess. Then I will recount my own notion of where New Age really started, why we are here in this universe in the first place and what our next step in spiritual growth might be.

1. Mysticism.

Mysticism is often referred to as an "altered state of consciousness." That is a help. Of course you want to know more. If you fall asleep, your state of consciousness has altered, and when you wake up, it has altered again. The specific state of altered consciousness referred to as "mysticism" must be different.

John Wesley described a state of consciousness he encountered in a chapel on Aldersgate Street in London. He said his, "Heart was strangely warmed." He interpreted it, and I do not doubt him, as an awareness of the Divine. He was at the time looking for some meaning to his existence, some notion that he was doing the right thing in his search for God. His experience was very reassuring to him, and he went on to found the Methodist Church, which in form is a sort of a club for people who are looking for God. Actually, it is large enough to have developed its own social, administrative and stylistic rules and traditions and of course is one of the organized religions that help people keep track of each other for purposes of finding mates. But the purpose of the church was and remains mystical. How it came to pass that so many of its young people have left and now search for mysticism elsewhere is a question I find hard.

In Lapland, there are or were tribal priests who would go into a sort of a trance when occasion called for it, who would have a mystical experience more or less on cue. They accomplished this (according to outside observers) with the use of tobacco and the stubbornly persistent beating of a small drum.

Edgar Allen Poe describes in his stories the ability to stare at some small and frivolous object with such intensity and patience that the mind became somehow different.

I have on unhappy occasion reacted to very bad news with a sense of unreality, a sense that the world could be heard and felt as if through cotton, that time, or at least the pressure of time, had moved away, that things had a slightly heightened sense of color and proportion. Instead of anguish one felt a strange sense of peace. Mind you, I have also just been very unhappy, but sometimes the news stuns more than hurts.

There are drugs, including alcohol, that can change the way one feels, can produce much the same effect as long meditation. What I suspect is this: there is ordinary waking and sleeping, and during sleep we process the day's memories and put together an image of the world we will use as the basis for the next day. When we are challenged by an experience, news, chemical, fatigue and maybe some other things, we react with a sense of disorientation. We were simply not prepared for this, and in a manner of speaking we shut down.

If we have had contact with the divine, it is an experience that no night's sleep can have prepared us for. Like the poor honeybee that has been grabbed by the beekeeper, we are beyond fear. We are stunned. I think it is important in such case not to confuse the cause with the effect. It used to be said that drug users would inject themselves with peanut butter. It was inert, but it made them very sick. They just had been made sick so often by illegal drugs that that had confused the side effect with the desired effect.

When you venture to pray or meditate, bear that in mind. If you learn something, do not confuse the mental state you go into - the rather pleasant and peaceful sense of intoxication - with the experience that caused it. And, unless you are the designated priest of tribe of Laplanders, do not try to bring on your mystical experience by abusing yourself either physically or pharmacologically.

2) Drugs.

During the sixties and seventies, the use of mind-altering drugs became very widespread and attracted a lot of attention. It was a logical extension of the anti-rational spirit of the century that had been progressing for decades. It made sense or a sort. If the mind cannot understand the world anyway, just go ahead and poison the mind.

There was a "philosophy" or I would say a fad called "existentialism." The reasoning went, "everything starts meaningless. Once you decide to invest something with meaning, that thing gains meaning. The only logical philosophical position is to take something arbitrary, assign meaning to it and make that you life."

People of lesser ambition were expected to choose "petty" goals like being kind, honest and industrious. Those with a better sense of the meaningless of it all would go for painting ugly pictures and constructing haphazard poetry. (Excuse me, am I sounding bitter?) Anyway, this philosophical trend led logically to the choice, "Since it nothing matters, I'll just choose to be a drug addict."

Existentialism is still the darling of the academic centers, where it appears to be acceptable to say, "Science is based on physical evidence, making it self-referential. Any other self-referential system is just as valid." Well that statement is just not true. Anyone who says he believes it will have a long time explaining why he checked that his word processor was on before he started to write his paper, and when he is done I will not believe him.

I suppose there is usually a culture and a counter-culture. Early last century as we mentioned, the main stream culture in the Western world was the Christian religion and the great churches. Science was the counter culture. Science none too tactfully pushed its way to center stage. It became the main stream; religion was in decline. Religion has since rebounded in some regions, but if you were to believe the newspapers and the students, by the sixties and seventies the counter culture was the drug culture.

The drug culture promised all sorts of profound new insights into life and society. To my observation, that never materialized. I did seem to notice that those of my friends who had taken drugs seemed unable to follow a chain of inference. And they seemed unaware that they had lost anything of consequence. Also, they seemed to have developed a distinct air of self-righteousness.

Into this unhappy state of affairs, there entered a book. It was by John Michell, and it was called View over Atlantis, first published in 1969. It was anything but mainstream, taking an interest in such things as the way certain churches and ancient monuments seemed laid out across the countryside on straight lines that seemed to serve no modern purpose. The book has been updated and can now be read as The New View over Atlantis. I warmly recommend it now, and it was a breath of fresh air in a stranded submarine at the time it came out. To my thinking, that one book marked the first turn away from drugs and toward the far more subtle and interesting modern New Age counter culture.

Drugs have not vanished, of course, but I do not consider them part of New Age.

3) Herbs.

One of the elements of New Age style is the use of "natural" cures and means for fostering continued health. As for "cures" and "alternative medicine," I was well taken by a little cartoon of a van parked in front of a house. On the van was a sign advertising an alternative lawn care company, and the yard was unkempt. If you are ailing, get a professional; the day has long since come when I doctor could do more good than harm. But on the matter of herbs for continued health, I am more open-minded.

Obviously these are unproven things. Were they clearly proven by science, then they would become part of the medical armamentarium and would cease to be counter-cultural at all. And as they are unproven, it would be folly to spend money one would miss in buying them. But so long as they are deemed safe enough to be sold over the counter and so long as one spends only recreational money, there just might be a point.

For instance, there is a whole class of chemicals called anti-oxidants. The theory is that there is a kind of chemical called a "free radical." (Sounds like a communist with a bomb under his cloak, doesn't it.") These free radicals are pieces of ordinary molecules. As you know, a water molecule is one oxygen atom bound to two hydrogen atoms. But suppose you had an oxygen atom bound to just one hydrogen atom? Water is quite stable under ordinary conditions, but this thing would be very eager to get another hydrogen and turn into water. This free radical would then take a hydrogen atom away from some stable molecule and THAT molecule might now be the free radical. In a kind of chain reaction, one free radical can initiate a number of events.

Living tissues maintain their properties in part because of the presence of some very long chains of atoms in very complex molecules. If you break one of those chains, the whole large molecule can be inactivated. So one free radical can break a lot of chains, cause a lot of damage and inactivate a number of molecules each much larger than itself.

Enter the anti-oxidant. It binds to the tissues and reacts eagerly with free radicals in such way as to inactivate them without creating more. It ends the damage spree

The benefits of free anti-oxidants have not been proven, but that does not mean everything. A mathematician named Goedel proved at some length that in any mathematical system sophisticated enough to do arithmetic, there would be things that were true of the system that could not be proven within the context of the system. They might be provable with a more powerful form of mathematics, but then there would be things true in the new system that IT couldn't prove, and so forth. Well I say life is more complicated than arithmetic, and there will be things that are true that cannot be proven.

A medieval scholar named William of Occam announced (among other things) that given two explanations of something, you always go with the simpler one. And that is good advice. If it has not been proven, it is always simpler to disbelieve it. However, Goedel has shown that Occam will inevitably be wrong on occasion.

Perhaps this is one such occasion; I do not know. I do know that care is needed. Some of the anti-oxidants can be toxic. After all, evolution has had a long time to fine tune our metabolism. Maybe, just maybe, there is some important step in the long-term maintenance of the human body that is blocked by anti-oxidants. Maybe that's why we don't make them ourselves.

So there is a theory, but in the absence of scientific evidence, the truth could lie in either direction. I have no advice.

I have been kindly disposed toward the use of aromas for enhancing life, particularly for people who are not subject to allergies. I like the notion that incense isn't just a nice smell that can mask nasty smells. I like the notion that smells are like letters in an alphabet, capable of interacting in specific and subtle ways. No I cannot prove it. I would not risk anything of importance on it, but it seems like a nice idea.

If you decide to use such things, prudence would suggest introducing yourself to one at a time, so if an allergy or sensitivity developed you would know what had hit you.

4) Crystals.

One thing people seem to enjoy within the New Age context is to hold and gaze at crystals. There is the notion that the crystals are somehow a source of power.

Now a plain natural quartz crystal is very inert. Unlike a good lump of coal, it cannot provide you heat or power. It is also an excellent electrical insulator. That is one reason that computers use quartz crystal as the basis of their circuitry. Most modern computers have at their heart "silicone chips," which are chips that have been carefully sawed off large synthetic crystals. On the inert, mechanically stable, insulating surface of the chip, the circuitry of the computer is developed.

This makes it sound as if holding a quartz crystal, or any other crystal, and gazing at it accomplishes nothing at all. But I don't look at it that way.

One of the innocent but silly pleasures of life is to sing in the shower. Shower stalls, in order to be easily cleaned and dried, have flat hard surfaces. When the shower is on, the splash of the water produces "white noise," consisting of vibrations over a wide range of frequencies with no distinct preferred pitch and no change over moderate time intervals. It goes, "Shhhhhhhh." Enter the bather, who has normal hearing. The human ear is so excellent you can almost hear the sound of heat, the sound of molecules vibrating at body temperature.

The shower stall, of course, will have a preferred frequency, even if the water itself does not. As the bather moves the ears around in the stall, there is a subtle change in the heard pitch. When a suitable pitch is found, the bather bursts into song, and sure enough, the location of the head is just right so that the shower stall reverberates at the pitch of the key in which the bather sings. This serves both to amplify the voice and to keep the tune on the right key. Sometimes it takes a little experimentation to get the head into just the right position for the desired key.

Yes, it's fun.

And yes, the same principle holds with a crystal. The person holding the crystal moves it around while looking at it, so there is an interaction between the light that the eyes pick up and the position of the hands. Obviously, any smallish object can be examined the same way, just as any old wall will return an echo. The part that is fun is listening for and finding just the right echo in the shower stall. And the fun is looking for and finding just the right set of reflections in the crystal.

Another thing that is fun about the crystal is the sense of wonder that such a thing can exist. How can such a perfectly formed geometric shape turn up in nature, where so many things just look like shapeless glop? The reason has been carefully worked out by scientists, who evidently were also charmed by the strange beauty of crystals.

Each crystal has a repeating unit of a number of atoms in a single geometric arrangement. Free, the unit may be a molecule. Put the molecules together and, because of their specific shape and charge distribution, they line up in a regular pattern. The visible shape reflects the underlying angles at which the lines of units lie.

Then, and this bit is also fun, consider the shapes of the repeating units. These have their shapes because of the interaction between the charge of the atoms involved and things called "bond angles." For instance, oxygen has two bonds, but they are not directly on opposite sides of the atom. They lie at an angle to each other. In water, where there are two hydrogen atoms bound to the oxygen, they do not lie exactly at the same angle as what the oxygen would - as it were- prefer. The positive charge of each hydrogen pushes them slightly apart. But the underlying tenancy, the urge, of the oxygen is to have its bonds at a specific angle. Any atom with more than one bond will have specific bond angles it tends toward. And THE ANGLES ARE DETERMINES BY THE HARMONICS OF A SPHERE. The first harmonic of a sphere is a sphere. In the second harmonic, the shape is sort of dumbbell with the bonds pointing opposite directions. In the third harmonic, they are at points of an equilateral triangle. In the fourth, they are at the points of a tetrahedron.

So when you are looking at a crystal and at the angles of a crystal, you are looking at a direct expression of the spherical harmonics that determine the shape of the physical world.

5) Harmony.

The word "harmony" enters New Age speech in a number of ways. The bottom line usually is the notion that if we all knew the right things, there would be no more strife. We would all be better off cooperating. Life is not a zero-sum game in which any person's gain is exactly another person's loss. How nice it would be if we could all learn to work together.

Akin to this is the somewhat more obscure idea that reality itself has a sort of a vibration, a sort of a frequency. The coming age is supposed to lift us to a new level, a higher frequency of vibration, and this change is to be abrupt, just as one spherical harmonic can only jump to a higher level; there is no intermediate form between a triangle and a tetrahedron. What one tries to do is to prepare oneself for the transition. This usually means saying and doing nice things, so I see no harm in it. Otherwise, I tend to shrug off notions of harmony and resonance. After all, no one has to buy into the whole shebang.

On the other hand, if you read John Mitchell's books, you will begin to be struck by the coincidences. Remember: the moon covers almost exactly one degree of the sky. Coincidentally, so does the sun. That means it takes just about three hundred sixty moons (or suns) so go all the way around the sky. That coincidentally is about the number of days in a year. Coincidentally, using a three hundred sixty-degree circle, the points of an equilateral triangle (one of those spherical harmonics) are separated by the same number of degrees as the present generation is from Adam.

If you like this sort of thing, look at Mitchell's books. He describes orbits of planets that are related at the ratios of small whole numbers. There are even a couple that are in the ration of the key of C to the key of G. The ancient Greeks spoke of the "music of the spheres" as having to do with the motions of planets.

And then, not that long ago, some scientific journal cool as a May morning mentioned "the fundamental frequency of the earth." Ha!

What they meant (I think) was this: ionizing radiation from the sun strikes the atmosphere and, unsurprisingly, ionizes it. The ionized air is a conductive surface and under certain circumstances acts as a reflective surface. Energy, say a bolt of lighting, released at some point will send out a burst of electromagnetic radiation in all directions over a broad range of frequencies. Some of those waves will be bounced off the ionosphere and some of them will continue to bounce around until they get back to where they started. The distance around the earth (24 thousand miles) and the speed of light (186 thousand miles a second) of course determine the time for the trip, which occurs at 7.75 cycles per second. This is subsonic; you could feel it, but it would be hard to hear.

So if you entertained the notion that the atmosphere was alive, or that it was acting like a giant antenna receiving a signal from elsewhere, you could set up a radio antenna and tune in at 7.75 hertz. I suppose you could speed up the recording and content yourself that there was nothing to hear.

But let's take a higher harmonic - the tetrahedral one. And to give ourselves the best chance of hearing something, we will place our listening stations (or some kind of suitable resonator) at points of a tetrahedron. Stationary aircraft are pricey, and the ocean has currents and winds that would make a stationary buoy problematic. We want to place our tetrahedron over land or over ice pack as much as possible.

I had a friend work with a computer to try to find suitable locations, but he had no success.

So I bethought me that one of the abiding notions of New Age is that the ancients knew a whole lot. For instance, the pyramids are placed on a latitude that just happens to cross more land than any other latitude; according to some it looks as if they already knew the surface of the earth as well as we do but were doing an excruciatingly accurate survey which could then be repeated with similar precision after a lapse of millennia.

So I took the pyramids as one point of my tetrahedron. They lie at about 30 degrees north and 30 degrees east. This is another silly coincidence. That puts them just about 120 degrees north of the South Pole. We are trying to make a tetrahedron, so we now go 120 degrees west. Well, life is not so simple; 120 degrees along any latitude but the equator will be shorter than 120 degrees along a longitude. But it's fairly close. And where you wind up is pretty close to New Orleans. So despite the earth being two thirds covered with water, three of the four points of our tetrahedron are over something solid. Mildly amusing, I think. However, if you move your three points at 30 degrees north to the west about twenty degrees, one vertex is now about on the Japanese Ryukyu island, one in the Sierra Madre mountains of Mexico and the other about where Libya, Tunisia and Algeria meet.

On the other hand, taking another tetrahedron with one vertex at the North Pole and the others midway between the longitudes of the first tetrahedron, we get nothing but ocean in the Southern Hemisphere. If we were to choose the same longitudes, as the pyramids, one vertex would be located in South Africa, one in New South Wales and one off the coast of Chile. If we moved them 20 degrees westward, we would move into South Australia, but would move off Africa. So we would not gain anything. It seems simpler to put the stations near the mouths of the great river system of the Nile and the Mississippi. Odd they both lie at thirty degrees north and just 120 degrees apart.

No, I don't propose to go to all those places to set up listening posts.

But you do see how the concepts of crystal, frequency and harmony interact.

6) Lines.

One thing that people have taken an interest in is laying a ruler on a map and seeing how it goes through ancient churches and monuments. For instance, if you proceed from the cathedral of Salisbury to Old Sarum, where the first church in that area was built, and then continue on a straight line, you will find yourself reaching the old monument of Avebury. A line from Avebury through the Glastonbury Tor Hill goes through an impressive number of churches and ancient sites. Again, I can do no better than refer you to Mitchell's books.

There is one long line of interest. Of course on the surface of the earth, over a long distance, the nearest thing to a straight line is a "great circle." This is the line you would describe if you passed a plane just through the center of the earth. It would cut the surface of the earth in a circle the size of the equator - no circle on the planet's surface can be larger.

The equator is a great circle. Any longitude is an arc of a great circle. So if you are going north or south, you are traveling a great circle; likewise east or west on the equator. If you go east father north, say at the Arctic Circle, you will make a circle, but it will be smaller. If you go northeast, you will travel in a spiral.

The easy way to find the great circle route between two points on the globe is to stretch a thread across the globe. Charles Lindbergh did just that in order to establish the coordinates he would have to reach to cross the Atlantic efficiently. He stretched a string from New York to Paris.

In an idle mood, reflecting on my almost-tetrahedron, I stretched a string across the globe from the thirty east thirty north to ninety west thirty north. It turned out to be just about the same line Lindbergh had drawn.

More-or-less, the line goes like this: Cairo (with pyramids), Alexandria, Athens, Naples, Rome, Mt. Blanc, Bern, Paris, Stonehenge, County Kerry, Gander, Nova Scotia, Boston, New York, Baltimore, Washington, Richmond, Charlotte, Atlanta, Montgomery and New Orleans. Extended westward, it goes through Mexico City and Aukland, an island in New Zealand. Extended eastward it goes through Mt. Sinai and Mecca.

No I have no idea what it means. I have dragged a string all over the globe and can't produce a similar lineup. The two other obvious line are: Cairo, Jerusalem, the Fertile Crescent, Mt. Ararat, a lot of Asia including Ulan Bator, Vladivostok, Tokyo, Pago Pago, (Chile, but I don't know exactly where the giant art is), mouth of the Niger River (like the mouth of the Nile and the Mississippi) and across the bulk of Africa to Cairo AND New Orleans, Key West, Haiti, Caracas, Rid do Janeiro, a lot of Indonesia, Bali, the Mindanao Deep, Seattle, Yellowstone, Denver and Oklahoma City. However, there is not another intersection to match New Orleans and Cairo. I think it's just a fluke. But if nobody is looking, grab a string and a globe and see what you find. My enthusiasm may have carried me away.

7) Free energy.

While I suppose I am a grudging believer in alignments, I really find it hard to credit some things that are proposed.

One favorite topic is free energy. This would be an infinite source of power that would never pollute, never run out and I suppose never get out of control. Well, that simply cuts across too much science to consider seriously without a lot of really substantial evidence.

Not long ago, scientists were seriously proposing cheap if not free energy, getting energy from fusing hydrogen into helium using very simple technology - the "cold fusion" technique. It seems to have fissled. The contraption depended on palladium as one of the electrodes. Although scientists worked hard on the project, it seemed to me the price of palladium never budged.

I for one have no hope for mental telepathy - it faces the same problems as free energy. I doubt the government has black helicopters prepared to spirit us away to slave camps or has a flying saucer (other than something it built) in a hangar out west. I have seen too many government agents trying to lie. They were not impressive. They could never keep a secret long. How long did it take the Russians to get the A-bomb itself from us? It did not take long.

There was the Philadelphia experiment in teleportation. The story is that a ship was moved from its dock many miles, stayed a while and then came back. According to the lurid stories crewmembers were found stuck through bulkheads when the ship returned to normal time and space.

I doubt it. What started it all, from my reading, was an experiment for tripping magnetic mines. They took a ship, wound a zillion yards of cable around it, put some current through the cable, and the ship vanished. (The current in the cable was supposed to produce a strong magnetic field and discharge the mines at a safe distance.)

Excuse me, but I dare say the ship vanished ON RADAR. In other words, they used alternating current. This produced an enormous radio wave that fried the electronics of any (verrry sennnnsitive) radar system than was looking at it. By knowing the exact design of the radar and timing an enormous energy pulse just right, a person could convince a radar system that it had seen something where nothing was.

Unfortunately, this might have meant using dangerous levels of radiation. Is too much radio wave dangerous? Suffice it to say DO NOT DRY YOUR CAT IN THE MICROWAVE OVEN. I would not think it far fetched if I heard that crew members were stuck to rather than through bulkheads heated by microwaves.

No I have no inside information on the Philadelphia experiment; it's just a guess.

Anti-gravity has been proposed. I doubt it. Even when, and this is actually true, the mainstream scientific literature suggests it I doubt it. Curious? Check Nature magazine from June 25, 1998, the article beginning on page 741. You can read it yourself. They don't suggest it can be harnessed, but I have a lot less trouble imagining harnessing it than imagining it at all.

8) Atlantis.

Within the context of New Age thinking there is the recurrent notion that we live in a civilization that exists in the context of an enormously extended time scale. We are heirs to untold millennia of art, wisdom, technology and tradition. Three or four thousand years to ancient Greece, Egypt and Sumer simply do not account for everything.

And of course, given current beliefs about evolution, the extended concept of time hits the nail squarely on the head. Much of our personality and no doubt much we think of as culture is genetic, and genetic changes are visible going back hundreds of millions of years in the fossil record.

However, the New Age idea does not relate to genetic heritage but to a technological heritage, either terrestrial or extraterrestrial. The extraterrestrial argument goes about like this. Suppose one in ten stars is similar to the sun in its ability to sustain life. This is not a pessimistic argument. More than two-thirds of stars are locked up in double star systems that could not hold a planet in stable orbit at the right distance.

Suppose one in ten suitable stars has a planet. In one in ten planet systems there is a planet at the right distance, with a moon if that is necessary. One in ten planets has the right mineral content and water. That is one in ten thousands stars has a habitable planet. Say one in ten of those develops life, and one in ten of those develops complex life. One in ten of those develops intelligence and a rudimentary technology.

So one in ten million stars will sustain a planet with intelligent life progressing to the technology of a stone axe. If each of those progresses as far as we, since there are billions upon billions of stars in the galaxy, there are probably many civilizations that have reached our level and many are much older than we. Serious people, I mean ones that spend your tax money, have sent messages intended for such civilizations and listened intently, and I confess rather frugally, for their radio programs. So the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence is an accepted main stream program.

The other possible ancient heritage also is based on a misty but very main stream idea. The famous philosopher Plato (he's the one who invented the idea of an institution for education as distinct from training) pointed out, quite incontestably, that the Greek civilization owed an enormous amount to the ancient Egyptian one. And in Plato's writings, it is mentioned that the Egyptians owed a lot to an older civilization called Atlantis.

Now when I read Plato's description of Atlantis, I see internal inconsistencies. So taking the description as already garbled, I see no problem with saying that Atlantis is the British Isles. Indeed, the archeological record is quite clear that the ancient Greeks had contact with Britain, and the record is also quite clear that the megalithic culture that started in Brittany and Britain spread all the way to Egypt before reaching Greece. End of hunt. There is no mystery. Much of our culture dates back to megalithic Britain.

Well, that is my opinion, but it is neither mainstream nor main counterculture. The mainstream ignores the impact because it is so poorly documented while so much of ancient Egypt is wonderfully documented. The counterculture ignores the impact because the British Isles are somehow not universal enough, not belonging to the world but to a small corner of it and to a relatively small number of people. (Actually, the inhabitants of megalithic Britain employed intensive agriculture. Their numbers may have exceeded those of present Britain and may have exceeded those of the rest of the world at the time, the civilizations of Sumer, Egypt and China having yet to appear. But the present population of British descent is relatively small compared to the rest of the world.)

So Atlantis is taken to be a full size continent that somehow sank overnight beneath the sea. The geologists snigger and say, "Sorry. No missing continent."

Sorry, but there IS missing continent. There is LOTS of missing continent. Suppose the earth began as a molten ball. Lighter elements floated to the top, cooled and hardened to become the crust. Currents in the still liquid interior pushed the crust around as a number of tectonic plates. Sometimes plates were sucked into the interior. Those that remained are now the continents; the places no longer covered by continental plates are the oceans.

Fine, but there is about twice as much ocean as continent. Shouldn't that lighter stuff keep popping up again? The continents must average THREE PLATES THICK. Statistically it just doesn't add up. Most of the continental plate has just mysteriously vanished.

I do have an idea, and we will get to it later. But at all events, continents don't vanish overnight.

Still, there is the feeling that advanced beings have been here before. Ancient maps are said to show Antarctica with bays and inlets that were not discovered until modern researchers did electrical resistance measurements on the surface.

There are reports of megalithic structures far from Europe and as old as European ones. I do not know. I have seen neither them nor their description in the main stream. New age publications describe them. I think it is a failure of main stream science not at least to mention their existence or nonexistence.

King Arthur had a "Round Table" to emphasize equality. That seems nice, and we are told that Medieval and Renaissance tables were very hierarchical, with access to the salt dish being one of the trappings of power. Recent workers have done measurements comparing strangers sitting at a table. If they sit beside each other, they will talk more than if they sit facing each other. They will talk to each other even more if they are sitting at two sides that are at right angles. And they talk most of all if they are sitting at a round table.

So Arthur, or at least the poet talking about him, made the right choice. But how could he have known? From the domination of Britain by the Celts to the presumed time of Arthur a thousand years later and the time of the printing of the stories five hundred years after that, in all that time, politics consisted of the strong telling the weak what to do. There was no impulse at any time to experiment with tables and decide what table was the best to use if you were looking for a consensus.

Either there has been a remarkable coincidence, or the poets were drawing on ideas about the relationship between people and furniture that went back to megalithic times.

So we have two possible sources of our Atlanean wisdom; it could have come from here or from the stars. There are those that say both are true: there was an Atlantis that sank beneath the ocean, and it had received instruction from aliens from other star systems. It is a pity we do not still have their ancient wisdom.

My attitude is that I can manage all right without their wisdom. What I want to know is where they went wrong. They are gone now. What took them out? If their catastrophe occurred on another planet, I am mildly interested. If it occurred on a continent here that sank, I am keenly interested. If it occurred in Britain, which did NOT sink, anyone in his right mind should be frantic to find out what their mistake was.

Before you choose between the extraterrestrial theory and the superficially mistier Atlantis story, there is a number you need to know.

Within the past few months, somebody has announced in the main stream scientific literature that a hand crafted stone axe head was dug up near a beach on an island near Australia. Since the axe could be dated by its location, and since it looked just like a whole lot of other axes that were known, the age and maker were immediately evident to the researchers. The odd thing to them was that the island was more than twenty miles from the nearest land, and it had been separated that much even when the sea level was at its lowest during the worst ice age ever.

Their considered conclusion was that the hand that made the axe also was able to make a seaworthy craft suitable for an ocean voyage. Remember that it was only about a thousand years ago when Europeans began to cross the Atlantic as a matter of routine.

Perhaps the maker of axes swam, but if so I am even more impressed. I suppose you would be too. It's easier to make a boat. That's why most of us cross large bodies of water with a boat, or a tunnel, or a bridge, or with an airplane, or we don't go at all. And that ocean crossing must have happened many times. There must have been a whole culture on the island in order for just one axe to turn up. A community cannot survive with many fewer than two hundred members. Either the boat carried two hundred or the crossing was routine.

The number you must know, must hold close to your heart, must worry about at night, that number is how long ago it happened. The hands that dropped that axe head, the hands that made that boat, the hands that guided that craft successfully and dependably across ocean seas, those hands dropped their axe head one million years ago.

It wasn't even a human. It was a Homo erectus. Erectus has long been known to make stone axes. What was not known was that this was a navigator.

So given an ideal planet, given a mind and hands capable of technology, given a technology capable of making stone tools and boats, in other words given tools not that much different from our own of a thousand or a couple thousand years ago, what are the chances of reaching our level of technology, of having a thousand years of technological growth?

If the chances are as low as of one in one thousand, and given that it takes ten million stars to produce one maker of axes, then it must take ten billion stars to produce one civilization such as ours. We are probably alone in the galaxy.

But if the chances are as high as one in one thousand, and starting from Homo erectus we had a thousand chances in each of a thousand little environments around the world, then there should be an enormous number of civilizations that have developed right here on planet earth.

In other words, the chance that some civilization developed to our level or greater right here at some time in the past utterly dwarfs the chance that a similar civilization reached the same level elsewhere in the galaxy. And that is just asking for jet travel, cell phones and a few local excursions around the solar system. The chance of visiting a different star system is again far smaller. Atlantis, did it exist outside megalithic Europe? I do not know, but the chances of it seem far greater than the chances of extraterrestrial intelligence.

As for inconspicuous aliens living unsuspected among us, I do not know whether that is possible. It has certainly been imagined. But non-human offspring of the Homo erectus, still surviving unsuspected is obviously much more likely just as their achievement of a high level of technology in the past is greater than a visit from an extra-terrestrial non human civilization.

But as for the question "Are we alone?" the answer is pellucidly clear that we are not.

We have each other.

"Ah," but you say, "The question was of another species with which we could share ideas."

And I say, "That is exactly right. We humans, we Homo sapiens, are more than one species. We are not separated far, but it is already true that not all groups of humans can have normally fertile offspring over many generations after mixing." I announce it: EARTHLINGS WE ARE HERE. TAKE ME TO YOUR LEADER.

9. Gaia.

Along with a feeling that there was a tendency toward universal harmony, that there was ancient wisdom among people and that people had properly sensed a Mother Nature, along with these ideas grew up the notion of Gaia. Initially, to many of us, the Gaia hypothesis seemed like a personification of the Earth Goddess. The proposition was briefly that during the existence of life as seen in the fossil record, the luminosity of the sun had increase by 25%. This seemed like enough to go from a planet to cold for life to a planet to warm for life. Yet life went on.

The hypothesis was that by some mechanism, the presence of life itself altered the earth's environment is such a way as to make it more stable and better as an environment for life.

Apparently this gave rise to some legitimate questions such as 1) How could it do that? and 2) How is that consistent with evolution in which competition reigns instead of cooperation? and Isn't that teleological (claiming a purpose when no purpose is justifiably inferred)? Well now that bastion of main stream science (and a really interesting read most weeks) NATURE has printed an article "Gaia and natural selection" Vol. 393 July 30, 1998 p 439.

The article undertakes to answer such questions. It also reviews the hypothesis in a much more thorough and authoritative way than I can.

The hypothesis is not proven, but it is now so main stream that I hesitate to call it a New Age idea any longer.

My congratulations to those who first came up with it and to those who have followed through.

10) Crop circles.

One cheerful feature of the modern world is a phenomenon that has occurred in many places, but most notably in England, the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Japan. There have been some in Germany, but the British will remark with satisfaction, "There's aren't as good as ours."

These are patterns of bent wheat or other crop that turn up when the field is growing. They do tend to have a circular underlying pattern. They are pleasant to look at and pleasant to visit.

If you have spent enough of your life wandering around aimlessly looking for Truth of the Holy Grail or It, whatever it is, you may have had the good fortune to stumble across a nice old fashioned wheat field, a field maybe a hundred feet across, a size for a single farmer to work, a nice field with no fence with maybe forest on a couple sides, a side with a mountain and the road your came along.

Approaching the field with due care to do no harm, you ran your fingers through the grain as you might run them through your parent's hair. You would have seen it was very beautiful. And you would have thought, this is cereal. For this humans gave up the ten hour week of the hunter-gatherer and undertook the seventy hour week of the subsistence farmer or modern suburbanite. And in return the field gives grain, food enough so that people can live in towns and cities. This is the miracle that fostered the modern human mind. This is the gift of the goddess Ceres, Demeter, Mother Nature in her kindest mood.

As you walk into an English field, the kind that has crop circles, the impression is more, I'm sorry, of silicone implants. I mean wheat! I mean we are really talking wheat now! Sturdy the stalks, heavy the grain, dense the packing. I don't know. There must be ten times the yield in one of those fields compared to the old fashioned kind. Touching the grain is more like picking up a great big fistful of poker chips.

Another thing you will notice in the field is a pattern of tracks left by the wheels of the farmer's tractor. They call them "tram tracks." Tram is a British term for what I call a streetcar. The tram tracks are there because, as we were told, the farmer spray's the wheat with something that starts the roots growing, then sprays to start the stalk growing, then sprays the field with something that stops the stalks. Then sprays the field with something that starts the ripening. You get the picture. This is high technology farming. And there is no question that it gives results.

The tram tracks give access to the interior of the field, so that it is possible to visit the crop circle, the farmer willing, and I suppose on occasion possible to create the crop circle without disturbing the standing grain. Our expedition was shown at least one lantern slide of a circle with a few neat little satellite circles. Tourists had visited the large circle and had made their way to some but not all of the satellites. The path made be people walking through the grain was easily visible. A few of the satellites lay undisturbed. Another pattern that included a large circle had the center of the circle undisturbed.

So if you plan to create your own crop circle, the tram tracks will solve some but not all of your problems.

Now they tell me that grain is always falling over under the weight of the harvest. I think I have seen it: just shapeless flattened areas in the middle of a big field. I pointed these out to a friend once, and he immediately explained that farmers would turn cows out in a field overnight and they would lie down and roll around and flatten the wheat. Which seemed odd. I thought cattle stood up at night. Besides, there were no tracks to the flattened areas. Perhaps the cows were dropped in by black helicopter.

Well the crop circles are no cow wallow. Nor are they simply grain falling under its own weight. One friend announced that they were caused by the force field from flying saucers, much as the gale from a helicopter will disturb things below it. I will plan to keep an open mind on that one until I see it myself.

What they look like is art. They look like carefully planned, exquisitely accomplished pieces of art. They are best seen from the air, but they are quite fun to run among, and they will frequently be placed so that they can be seen from a road.

The patterns, well I suppose there is no substitute for some good aerial pictures, but I have never been in a position to make them. I would say that the patterns are abstract, reasonably simple, often quite appealing to the eye and occasionally explicit in demonstrating education.

There is, for instance, an equation called the Mandelbrot equation. Computers can produce it as a very appealing graph with lots of compelling imagery. The equation is self-referring, each solution being used in the next calculation, and the detail of the final graph is limited only by the computing power and time invested. It is the fine detail of the graph that looks pretty. That is what you will see pictures of. The overall shape is rather like a blob; it was this overall shape that was displayed as a crop circle.

Unquestionably, some of the circles are the product of human energy. Whether they all are, or whether some are produced by intelligence we do not recognize, to my eye, they are art. And that is no small accomplishment. Someone has told me that the single original art form of the twentieth century has been Art Deco. Everything else, according to my informant, was a revival of something that had been done before. There was even Art Nouveau, which was a revival of Art Deco.

Even Art Deco could be challenged. Someone pointed out carvings on the Glastonbury Abbey and said they looked like art Deco to him. The carvings were Romanesque. So maybe even Art Deco is a revival.

So if the crop circles are art, they are quite possibly the only really new art form of the century. And as art, they are interesting, both for their intrinsic beauty and for the question of their motivation. A lot of artists perform their art for money. This is obviously is not the case with crop circles. A lot of artists do their art for fame. Not here. A lot of artists are trying to make a political point. Since politics is basically the process of forcing people to behave differently from the way they would like to, the one who makes a political point is searching for power over others. There is no political point that I can make out from the crop circles.

So perhaps we are looking at art for art's sake. One hears about such things, but one seldom sees, particularly in quantity with high quality.

But perhaps these works do happen in a tradition. It is clear that they tend to occur in the neighborhood of ancient monuments, such places as Stonehenge. Now a "henge" is an ancient monument dating back to megalithic times in Britain. The thing that makes it a henge is the presence of a circular ditch and a dike. The dike may be inside or outside of the ditch. Stonehenge started as a ditch and dike; the stones are a later addition. Woodhenge, so named because of the evidence of old posts, probably supporting the roof of an immense hall, started as ditch and dike. The crop circles, mostly based roughly on a circle but with unlimited elaboration, the crop circles are about the size of the ditch and dike of an ancient henge.

I used to think it would be fun to hang out with the people who made Stonehenge, just to see what they are like. Well now the crop circles, being made in the same place and of the same size and for equally enigmatic reasons, are being made by people who could pass without attracting comment in modern England.

We inspected a few at first hand. The grain was supposed to lie in a "woven" pattern. Indeed there were places where some went one way and some the other, but it was hardly woven in the sense that textile is. I mean woven is a good word for it, but do not look for something that came off a loom.

The bending of the grain was supposed to occur at joints in the stalk and the joints themselves were said to be swollen. And so it seemed to be. However, I would not have been surprised if grain mechanically forced down might respond the same way over a period of time. At experiment would seem like a good thing to do; find a crop circle the morning after it was formed and, with the owner's permission, flatten a bit elsewhere and see if it looks the same days later, swollen joints and all.

Sometimes evidence of scorching has been reported. I saw no scorch although I spoke with someone who had seen scorching in a different crop circle.

While I was grubbing around on my hands and knees looking, it occurred to me that there were probably weeds in the field somewhere, and if the grain had been forced over mechanically, a short weed should not have been affected. Any mechanical device able to clear the uneven surface of the field should not stay within two inches of the surface. Presently I found a small blade of grass, ordinary lawn grass, and not wheat. The grass was bent in precisely the direction the wheat was.

Of course people had been walking around on it, and the grass may have been pushed down with the wheat, and one blade proves nothing. But it was nice to have a little sense that there was some mystery still to be worked out.

I do not have a highly developed sense of symbolism. I think Sigmund Freud took the notion of sexual symbolism beyond the call of sanity. But I have hear it said and do in part believe that if you give a bunch of blocks to a little boy he will build a tower, and if you give the blocks to a little girl she will build an enclosure. If you tell me that the universal appeal of a castle is that it incorporates both towers and enclosures, I may not follow you. But the difference between tower and enclosure I will accept at least as being valid as a distinction.

And that is one thing that the henge monuments clearly share with the crop circles. They are enclosure-like. So one must entertain the thought that these accomplishments, however much they partake of prankishness, in some sense celebrate the Goddess.

11. The Goddess.

Long after the Homo erectus left the last evidence we have found, while the Neanderthal person was still in his prime, there appeared skeletons of what are now called, "Anatomically modern humans." They developed a more advanced technology. The Neanderthal people never got past the idea of taking a hunk of rock and knocking flakes off it to make an edge. The moderns noticed that the edge on the flake was a lot sharper than the edge on the rock it came from. So they took to shaping the flake. This way they could make nifty things like arrowheads.

These more modern people tens of thousands of years ago did some paintings that are admired for their vigor and clarity to this day. They made some little statues of a size to hold in your hand. The statues were of fat girls. Some believe that the statues were objects of worship. I do not know; I was not there.

Some time, thousands of years ago, the English Channel opened, partly isolating the British Isles from the continent; until then they were confluent. Although Britain did not produce a profusion of paintings and human seeming statues that have come to us from those days, it is quite plausible that whatever religion they had was much the same as on what is now the continent.

They may have worshipped some sense of female presence. It is very hard for us to say, because already getting started at that time and eventually dominating the world was a new religion, which was male-oriented. In order to sense the Goddess, then, we must look through the male filter. It is like looking through a stain glass window. It may be very beautiful, but it is not the sun.

Let my try to put together a sort of male manifesto, as number of themes that I have noticed widespread in the world. 1) Males are in control. 2) It is important for males to be warriors. 3) The experience of life is something that must be analyzed. 4) There are supernatural creatures around - lots of them. 5) These spirits can be scary. 6) Under certain circumstances it is needful and proper to be cruel. 7) Life is not funny. 8) Somebody has to be in charge. 9) Horses are fierce. 10) Life is determined by cause and effect, by fate. 11) Women are not to be trusted. 12) Strangers are not to be trusted. 13) Male pride is not a matter for ridicule. 14) The firstborn is important. 15) A man serves his country or tribe. 16) Time goes in a direct linear fashion.

That's enough for a start. You get a feel for it. That is the screen through which one may try to glimpse the Goddess behind. O the male religion had goddesses, lots of them, but we are looking for something more universal.

One example of the screen at work is beans. An enthusiastic feminist friend once told me that female wisdom was superior, and the fact she cited was that men think they need meat, but women know beans do just as well. I told her that she was drawing from an essay "On Plantations" by Francis Bacon. It is not that obscure. We had to read it in high school English class. She did not think that the fact that a male had said the same thing four hundred years before was funny. The problem is that you cannot be immersed in a culture that has been dominated by analytic male thinkers for so many centuries without it getting into your own thinking.

Another example is the word "pagan." I had a friend who called herself a pagan, and thought it a matter of some importance that her meaning of the word was the true and proper one. She seemed to take the Goddess very seriously. But the word "pagan" in formal usage has time out of mind been used to mean the classical gods and goddesses of Greek and Roman antiquity. Pagan in this sense meant exactly those things that she did not like. Perhaps for the time being we should say "male pagan" when we mean pagan in the sense of the Greek and Roman pantheons and their kin. She was using "pagan" to mean "pre-Christian in spirit even pre-pagan earth religion type." But she didn't have a really good word for that; the male screen did not provide one.

Another example of the screen in action is this: I have heard it said that, "The Christian Trinity is but a poor reflection of the TRUE trinity, which is the Goddess. The Goddess has three manifestations: the girl, the mother and the crone." Well I am sorry, but that just happens to be the riddle of the sphinx.

The sphinx sat on a cliff above the road, and it would ask travelers a riddle. "What walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon and three legs in the evening." Any traveler who could not answer was killed. It is an old Greek story. The answer is a man, who walks on all fours as an infant, strides heel-and-toe in his prime and hobbles on a cane as a gaffer.

You see how male the myth is: first off it mentions a man as if he were the only sort of person, second it is highly analytic, and third it is highly fatalistic, fourth it is not very funny.

It would be tempting to run the male filter in reverse. Then we could say that, at the time of the Goddess, as evidenced by the interest in making enclosures, no one was in control, there was peace, life was lived rather than analyzed, there was no supernatural threat, you could always be kind, you could always laugh, decisions took everyone into account, if horses were nice it was because they were cute, you didn't have to do what you didn't want to, anyone could be trusted, anything could be laughed at, all children were important, the tribe or nation served its members and love and life were ours forever.

It seems rather pleasant, although myself I would still have the impulse to start analyzing things. The trouble is that it is a total craven surrender to the male religion concept of what is important. Worshipers of the Goddess might not have been like that, and they certainly might not have listed those issues as keys to their own self-understanding.

So far as I can put it together, for Britain at least where I suspect the old religion may have held out very long compared with elsewhere, you could say some things about them. They did organize in large groups. They built on a large scale. They did take an enormous interest in astronomy. They were inclined to make wonderfully accurate measurements and to think on scales far greater than what can actually be seen. They delighted in riddles and mazes. In other words, physical and intellectual laziness were not the order of the day.

If I were to look for a "trinity" of goddesses, I think I would count them like this: the virgin, the lover and the mother. Some of these forms may have survived into the later age.

Artemis, or Diana, was worshiped in ancient Greece and Rome. Her most outstanding temple, the one at Ephesus, was one of the ancient wonders of the world. She was hugely popular. Anything within an arrow's flight from her temple was thought to be under special protection by the goddess. One hears rumors that the Virgin Mary spent her last days in that city. It has been suggested that some of the affection people feel for the Virgin is a carry over for their love of Artemis. She was goddess of the moon and of the hunt.

She keeps stirring things up. I understand that recently the Pope has declared that one can get salvation directly from the Virgin without having to involve God at all. Whatever he said, that is how it came to me. Somebody takes her very seriously.

The church at Old Sarum was replaced by the cathedral at Salisbury. Although it looks like they located the new cathedral by proceeding along an alignment of ancient monuments, the story is that they shot a bow from the old church, and where it landed they built the new … a mile and a half away. The story goes on that the arrow struck a deer and the deer ran over a mile before dropping. The deer of course is associated with Diana. And the bow shot from the temple, or church, may be just a coincidence. But it is true that the Cathedral at Salisbury is dedicated to the Virgin.

So prehistoric or not, the Virgin is not a goddess to be trifled with.

Another expression I would say was Venus, goddess of physical love. There are those who would identify her with Mary Magdalene. The relics of Mary Magdalene are said to be still in a little chapel in the south of France. I have gone there, but they were not letting people in.

And then, of course, there is the Mother. And here male analysis breaks down. There just does not seem to be a good one. O there are mothers aplenty in mythology, Ceres, for instance, but none seems quite to have the stature. Eve would be a logical bet, but go ahead, list two or three things you remember that Eve did as mother.

It is as if the entire analytic process is overloaded in contemplating the goddess as mother, or perhaps her loss is still so unspeakably painful as to derail the mind.

Virgin, lover and mother: three faces of the Goddess. They seem to be chronological, but in fact they are not. Women of any age seem to me to be able to become any of the three along with all the personality states that are available to a man. And they will jump from personality to personality in mid sentence without a sense of strain. I could be wrong, and I am certainly not complaining. Anyway it is only a male perspective.

So what happened? Having spent a hundred thousand years with the Goddess, why did we abandon her?

We did not abandon her for Christianity; that did not yet exist and would nor for thousands of years when the process started and would not come for five hundred years after Britain fell to the Celt. In fact, my sense of it is that Christianity was a decided step AWAY from the warlike, male dominant, polytheistic gods, although the institutions of the churches sometimes began to take on the old male pagan administrative forms and artistic styles.

It seems that at the time Goddess was so much more pleasant than the alternatives, why did we give her up? Well, I suppose you could say it was because of warfare. Once somebody had invented war, everyone else had to go along or be overrun.

But that is not so. People will fight as enthusiastically for the Goddess as for any blood splattered idol of the male pagan tradition. The megalithic people of Britain were never overrun. They built spectacular fortifications against the sea. Even though they seemed to be at peace with each other and to be cooperating throughout Britain in the megalithic era, they seem to have had no trouble keeping invaders at bay. When, in five hundred BC, the Celts arrived with all the trappings of a male oriented religion, they reported England empty, "Except for a few giants."

The population had crashed horribly. Somehow the Goddess had failed.

They did not vanish completely. In fact, recent research in mitochondrial DNA (which tells you what has been happening to the women but not the men) has found that ninety-nine percent, yes just about all, people now living in Britain of recognizably British ancestry are descended from people who were there long before megalithic times. They are the worshippers of the Goddess. No wonder the crops still bow in patterned rings.

Of course by now you know pretty much what happened. It was that hybrid infertility. In order to build the greatest of the monuments of megalithic times, it was necessary to mobilize talent throughout Great Britain. Young people who came to lift the stones met other young people. They fell in love, married and settled down to raise children with people who might have been from anywhere in the land. At the time, the population was at its absolute maximum carrying capacity. Every plot was tilled. Hills were terraced. There must have been a thousand to the square mile. Within a few centuries there were probably not a thousand in all of Great Britain.

The invaders, the Celts, the Romans, the Anglo Saxons, the Vikings, the Normans came and were victorious in the field. But the Goddess had her revenge. Hybrid infertility pushed their numbers ever lower and lower. The Y chromosome, which will tell more about the male experience, is already being studied.

Well that is a chronology, but it is not an explanation. If warrior religions are not routinely victorious in the field, what became of the Goddess? If invaders will die out because of hybrid infertility, how do invaders persist? Yes, the Celts entered a nearly empty land, but behind them was a world almost completely in the hands of male warrior types. How so?

Hybrid infertility usually is rather painless. Those that suffer usually are only children who never are born, who never are recognized as a pregnancy. They are only noticed as - oh, I didn't get pregnant this month, maybe next time. I would not discount the unhappiness of couples who want to have a child and cannot, but usually it is an unhappiness they will survive. And as I pointed out, the damage is usually delayed until a second generation.

But there is an exception. That is Rh incompatibility. It is a long story but the short version is that it is a consequence of cross breeding. When it strikes, the woman typically has one fertile child and the rest of her children die or are permanently brain damaged. Under any state of medical care before the last couple centuries, repeated pregnancies and deliveries, besides being very painful, frequently resulted in the painful death of the mother.

Although the dead fetus will have two different kinds of genes, the dying mother has both genes of the same sort. It was this death of the mothers that made the world go from essentially all one blood type to overwhelmingly a majority of the other type.

And I think it shaped the way men thought about women and changed it for the worse. I expect that the rise of male centered pagan religions simply reflected the rise of the "Rh positive" genes. Britain was a late holdout of Rh negative genes.

Ironically, the whole problem could have been avoided by sufficient analysis. And it is males who are expected to be analytic, to take charge and make reasonable decisions based on cool objective assessment of real facts. But on this one most important topic, the next generation, males decided that was women's business and did not think or talk about it. Perhaps it was too painful, but the males failed AS MALES as defined by the male pagan tradition.

A man can take pride in his accomplishments and take pride in his family. But if a man takes pride and struts simply because he is a male, then he invites a sneer. For tens of thousand of years and throughout the planet, males watched their women die in agony rather than examine the facts and draw prudent conclusions. It is not a pretty history.

So I would trace the origin of New Age style, not to a change in the calendar, but I would trace it back to megalithic Britain and before. The Goddess stirs.

The way to proceed is simple. There is no real conflict between the Goddess and any other religion. She is, after all, not so well characterized as to produce conflict. Besides, conflict is one of those male pagan things.

If people, or at least a sufficient number, were to realize the penalty paid for cross breeding, I think cross breeding would decline sharply among those who actually cared about children. With that, hybrid infertility would decline rapidly. That would mean that all those nice, trusting, friendly openhearted people who now marry others of a slightly different background would stop dying out. The world would be a friendlier, more openhearted place.

But of course there is an issue that is more important than the mere survival of the human race in all its wondrous species. There is an issue that transcends time, and I will try to make it clear very quickly.

Central to New Age thinking is the advent of the millenium, and central to thinking about the millenium is the notion that God will come, raise the dead, transform the earth and take some (I say all) of us into heaven.

Perhaps that seems scientifically unlikely. It is not unlikely.

The universe, according to our best theories, must either be expanding or contracting. If all the matter in the universe were placed in a small space, that would be a black hole, and the matter could never escape. Therefore the universe is not expanding. Therefore the universe is collapsing.

When we look at the universe, it looks like it is expanding. So we must have the direction of time wrong. Time is really going backwards. We call the future that part of time we do not know. We call be past that part of time we do know.

Imagine writing down the location of every particle in the universe, giving each location a number. Let the universe get bigger. There are now more locations than your numbering system covered. You cannot predict the larger state. You cannot predict the future.

Similarly, at any moment in the universe there is ample information to describe the universe in a smaller state. That part of time is what we call the past, and the past is completely fixed.

So "normally sensed" time would be the sequence of states that obtain as the universe gets bigger. "Properly sensed" time is the sequence of the same events as the universe gets smaller. The Big Bang, or beginning of the universe in normally sensed time, is quite impossible. The Big Crunch, or end of the universe in properly sensed time (which of course is the same event), is not much of a puzzle.

Obviously, a black hole is a collapse of space with infalling matter. That can only happen in one direction in time, which is what we are calling properly sensed time. By this logic, in normally sensed time we should never see a black hole form and collapse, but we might occasionally see a black hole blow up. This might be very violent - like the black hole suspected at the center of the galaxy - or it might be very gentle.

There could be a smallish slowly expanding black hole at the center of the earth. Now the universe was measured to be 7 billion years old or so. They then changed the estimate because there are star clusters 12 billion years old. Taking the actual measure, the universe should be 14 billion light years across. If so, and if the diameter of the earth is expanding at the same rate as the universe, the circumference of the earth should be increasing at three or four millimeters a year. This is getting into the realm of what modern instrumentation can actually pick up. It is also or the order of magnitude of how fast tectonic plates move.

This would account for the blatant fact that there is not enough continental plate to cover the earth. The earth has increased in size since the crust first formed.

There could be a medium sized expanding black hole in the center of the sun, which would account for the fact that the sun does not produce as many neutrinos as is should for the amount of energy it is putting out.

If you were to fall into a black hole, there would be two moments that would be important. The first moment would be when you crossed the event horizon, the level at which gravity takes complete charge and below which nothing escapes. The other moment would be when you became crushed to a geometric point at the center. Running that backwards in time, the point becomes the big bang that modern scientists see as the origin of the universe. The event horizon would be something they haven't noticed yet.

In a matter of speaking, that will be the millenium. Not just the earth but the entire universe will undergo a profound change. Since time is a consequence of the fact that we are falling into a black hole, when we fall out, time ceases to exist. The graves may open. Things might get very unpleasant. A lot of us believe there will be a savior there waiting to look after us.

I don't know. I was there, but I don't remember.

Of course we will be immortal; time will have ceased to have meaning.

And we will not have wasted our time. If time has no meaning, then creation and destruction are the same; it is only the direction of time that has changed. Good and evil are equivalent. Better and worse are the same. Time goes both ways.

In the present universe, of course, we are quite aware that good and bad are different.

That is what we will have learned.

That is what we will remember when we meet again.

We are all volunteers here. If we were being punished by being placed here, we would remember our crimes.

How noble we are. How very idealistic of us all to have jumped in here so as to learn at first hand what a moral universe is all about. We should be proud. Even us men.

The megalithic people spent great time and effort observing the sky and apparently measuring the earth. I think they may have had the same idea. Perhaps they were trying to decide if the earth really was slowly expanding from the inside. Perhaps they were trying to guess when the millennium would happen. I cannot guess myself, but I doubt it will be in the next few years.

Booty

Moon over Stonehenge

Editor's note:

Wild Surmise is an occasional newsletter on speculative matter. It has been years since our last attempt. We hope the next will not be so much of everything but the kitchen sink.

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 Ed

Crop Circle

During most of my life, earnest questions involving such things as morals and actions usually wound up with someone saying, "It doesn’t matter anyway. We could all be blown away in a nuclear explosion any minute." It was sort of a national obsession, and I never thought it produced a healthy state of mind or led to the best decisions.

I have now, at my elbow, an object from those days.

Imagine it is a few years ago. Mistakes have been made. Diplomatic channels have failed. American intentions have been misinterpreted. An order goes out of Moscow, "It’s real." Somewhere over Siberia a Tupolev bomber turns north.

Four hours later, it has picked its way among 7,000-foot peaks in northern Greenland and has descended over Baffin Bay, where tankers refuel it in the air. By the time five hours is up, it has entered United States air space. In those five hours, certain things have been accomplished. Fail-safe and back-up systems have been armed, safety devices deactivated. Orders and target coordinates have been confirmed. Radio silence has commenced.

The mechanical firing clock has been wound, set and started. The tired yellowed plastic protective cap has been removed from the cable junction on the back of the clock, and the live cable from the bomb launch mechanism attached, nineteen pins including two ground leads carefully fitted into the socket on the cable. The time for launch has been set. The bombs will not be physically released from the bomber over the target, but launched in a bouquet of cruise missiles. There are six missiles in a rotating magazine in the bomb bay and four more under the wings, each carrying a warhead capable of delivering destructive force equivalent to two hundred thousand tons of TNT.

A parallel clock on the missile launch mechanism has been checked. The Tupolev had descended to about one hundred feet. The plane was painted briefly by radar as it entered Quebec and again entering Maine, 138 feet from pointed nose to tip of swept tail, wings folded full back for speed. The two Kuznetsov turbo fan-jets deliver fifty tons of force.

The great engines make ground good at three seconds a mile, a speed they ordinarily would approach only at very high altitude. The heat lights forest fires. Animals are cinderized in their tracks. Anyone close enough to identify the silhouette of the machine is knocked unconscious by the shock wave of its passage within two seconds. Buildings directly below the flight path explode.

The bomber does not follow any direct route. It jinks, dodges and covers, expertly taking advantage of terrain, radar-cheating temperature changes and radar-cluttering antenna farms. The pilot has followed the route hundreds of times in simulating drills, ironing out any semblance of predictability or pattern. But although the pattern seems random, the purpose is deadly earnest. It is coming at you, coming twelve hundred miles an hour.

Invisible, invincible? That idea will be tested by scores of interceptors now scouring the sky. They fly as fast as the Tupolev and faster. They can fly as high as ten miles, but at such a height have no hope of seeing the bomber so they fly lower, hanging upside down to look at the earth. The bomber has been painted to be inconspicuous against the ground. It is no larger than a few cars. The shock wave is visible but is only inches thick. The search is difficult. Every commercial aircraft that has failed to respond instantly to military challenge and order has been shot down without hesitation. Occasionally one interceptor will shoot another.

Magically take the crew of four from the bomber and crews from the interceptors, even now, transporting them to some bar or other neutral ground. Within twenty minutes they will, all language barriers notwithstanding, either be laughing, pounding each other on the back and sharing drinks or they will be beating each other up: in either case, perfectly normal behavior. Right now they are just doing their jobs.

Thirty minutes before launch, a young man reaches for the clock. He presses this button, right here at the lower right hand corner of the face. That is right. I have the firing clock here beside me. The button that arms the launch, that will take up to eighteen million lives, that button looks very much like the one that only winds and sets the clock. There is a label in Russian. And there is a little red arrow pointing clockwise. The harmless button has a little black arrow that points counter clockwise.

Once that button has been pressed, it is done. The missiles will be launched; the bombs will go off. If the interceptors fail, the bomb will go off over the target – over you. You and everything for some miles around will turn to ash, and destruction will extend much farther out. If the interceptors get lucky, perhaps we lose only the state of Vermont.

The button does not send a secret code or even a signal. Instead, the bomb launching mechanism is active. As it has far years, it asks again and again for permission to go off, sending out a twenty-seven volt feeler. Every few minutes, it checks for the new pin combination that will permit the firing sequence: restless, frantic, looking for the wink that will unleash its madness. In thirty minutes it will get that pin combination.

There will be other chores. There are last minute checks and switches. Then the cruise missiles must be released. The missiles’ own navigation systems and rockets must function, the shaped charge in the warhead detonated, the hollow metal ball of refined U235 collapsed into a single nugget and the nuclear reaction initiated. But it will be far beyond human recall.

If an interceptor can catch the Tupolev first, the interceptor will launch rockets, and if the rockets to not bring it down within seconds, the interceptor will be in range with Vulcan nose cannon. If the cannon fail and the bomber is overflown, the interceptor might fishtail, throwing out a herringbone pattern of shock waves. That could dismantle the bomber, but the Tupolev itself has a pair of nose cannon firing slugs an inch across, capable of doing within seconds what it would take two chain saws all afternoon. Conceivably, the interceptor might come up under one wing tip, bodily turn the Tupolev upside down and ride it so close to earth that the bomber cannot recover.

It will not end there. The interceptor will empty its gun belts and its rack of weapons rack into the wreck of the bomber, even hurling the weapons rack itself into the hazard, hoping against hope that a blessed slug or fragment will stop this little clock.

But that is only if the interceptors are very lucky. And it is for you, that the bomb comes, for you the forests burn, for you the civilian jets crash flaming into the hills, for you the clock ticks. This clock, this very one.

There were others, other clocks of course. There were and are. But there were never many. And so, year in and year out, from time to time, this trigger was meant for you. And over the most of the second half of this century, for every month you spend in or near a city or military base, this very clock was targeted – on average – on you for about an hour.

Have you ever had a person hold a weapon on you? If so, I doubt you ever forget it, even if it was only for a few minutes. This weapon was held on you. Chances are good it was held on you hour after hour, many hours a year and for many many years.

But it is all right now. I have it. I shall keep it on the mantle or possibly turn it into an alarm clock. I shall never let it hurt anyone. There are many others. But this one nightmare is now over.

 M

Wearyall Hill

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