I briefly answered this email, only to thank him for writing and to suggest that I would elaborate my thoughts in my article next week. Here goes:
First, and parenthetically, I don't think that New Orleans, with its strong and long connection to Caribbean Voodoo and Santeria, lacks paranormal activity. But more to the point, you do not have to be spiritual in any way to observe that the world is full of strange phenomena that cannot be explained materialistically, as dumb atoms merely bumping into (randomly acting upon) other atoms. Any gambler will attest that something else is going on; sometimes you get lucky and get on a roll.
When I was barely 20-years-old, I read a thin volume about a European's experience in a Tibetan monastery in the 1920's, The Way of the White Clouds. This European, a German as I recall, who was a disciple himself, writes of being woken up one night by shouts of "The Bodhisattvas [beneficent spiritual beings] are here!" He got out of bed and followed everyone up to the roof of the monastery where all stood in awe watching luminous globes floating not far off in the sky. If you can't believe someone who trundled off from Europe to Tibet in 1920 to become a spiritual disciple, then who can you believe?
But, in prelude to answering my questioner's concerns, even granting that strange phenomena exist, what do I make of those? Stay with me:
Gravity, one of the four cosmic forces, is (unlike the other three: electro-magnetism, the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force) poorly understood. In fact, it's completely mysterious. Newton, who, although when hit on the head by an apple calculated gravity's mathematical force, found his own idea of how gravity worked, that bodies at a distance pull each other (act on each other immaterially) absurd. On this point his contemporaries soundly criticized him for reintroducing occultism into philosophy/science; that century's "spooky action at a distance."
Centuries later Einstein theorized that gravity results from mass bending space-time. (His theory was proven by observing, during an eclipse, the way that our Sun bends the light from distant stars.) According to Einstein things are not pulled, but "roll," as it were, into the divot, the hole that large celestial bodies create in space-time.
"As below so above," our observable universe reflects what happens in higher, invisible realms. Ideas have gravity. Ideologies draw in, not only people, but "physical" reality itself. When you have millions of people chanting on the Tibetan Plateau for a thousand plus years, things happen.
In the realm of ideas, given current events, I have been considering antisemitism. In my opinion the best explanation of this phenomenon is that the Jews cannot be forgiven for introducing the idea of a moral god who cares about how you behave. Another important factor, at least in the Christian variety of Jew hatred, is that ecclesiastical authorities have always been very uncomfortable with the fact that they are worshipping a Jewish rabbi as God. But all that aside, I believe that, for true believers, like those old women walking by my house in San Antonio to church every day, miracles are done in the Nazarene's name. I also believe that there are Jewish kabbalists in Safed and Jerusalem who can walk through walls.
Communism and Nazism are also ideologies that had and still have their true believers. They create their own psychic centers of gravity by means of which people are drawn in. But, not being in accord with primary the universal principle, Be Good, their rites and ceremonies do not generate the same degree of gravity; their ceremonies are not accompanied by "visible phenomena in the sky"; the Bodhisattvas do not come to visit. Capitalism, as in the worship of wealth, is also a non-miraculous cult.
Alan starts his article reflecting on the seeming wackiness of UFO stories, before offering his own hard-to-believe account of "visible phenomena in the sky" during Chogyam Trungpa's cremation. UFOs are proof that there is more to life than usually meets the eye. At best they are Bodhisattvas come to remind us, as religions also do at their best, that (as the title of Alan's article proclaims) there is Only Mind (with a capital M).
So, to the man who wrote and asked, yes, Death has been visiting my immediate neighborhood, and the black hospital attendants up in New Orleans may be right that deaths do come in 3's. But don't let that stop you. Go ahead and buy the house. Light some candles, say some prayers, burn some copal there. And, please, accept this article as my personal exorcism of any bad juju there; Dios te bendiga, God bless you. Also, just to be sure, the next time the Tibetan monks visit town, have them come by and bless your new home.
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Dr. David Fialkoff presents Lokkal, public internet, building community, strengthening the local economy. If you can, please do contribute content, or your hard-earned cash, to support Lokkal, SMA's Voice. Use the orange, Paypal donate button below. Thank you.
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