Bert Lahr as The Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz (1939).

Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than one’s fear. The timid presume it is lack of fear that allows the brave to act when the timid do not. But to take action when one is not afraid is easy. To refrain when afraid is also easy. To take action regardless of fear is brave.
– Ambrose Hollingworth Redmoon (James Neil Hollingworth) in his article “No Peaceful Warriors!” in Gnosis: A Journal of the Western Inner Traditions, Volume 21, “Holy War”, (San Francisco, California: Lumen Foundation, Fall 1991), p. 40. Cited in part by Lee Graves in private email (January 2, 2008).

Truck overloaded with bricks.
Image credit: TechEBlog - One Brick Too Many

Here are a few orphics that [Ali] Baba threw off while riding from the Battery to Union Square in a cable car:
All is not beautiful that aspires high.
A square tower of bricks is as beautiful as a square tower of bricks.
A gorgeous entrance over-dazzles a multitude of shams.
When the front of a structure is as the wall, the wall would do as the front.
In all this dazzle of brick a man must think in squares and oblongs.
Methinks the oblongs are of the long-green variety.
The honest craftsman loves what is green in nature.
The New York craftsman delights in the other green.
New York is machine-made.
I hear it is run by a machine.
One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men.
No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.
– Anson Blackman (Ali Baba) in The Philistine: A Periodical of Protest, edited by Elbert Hubbard, Volume 18, Number 1, (East Aurora, New York: The Society of Philistines, December 1903), p. 26. Cited in part in private email by Lee Graves (March 8, 2005).

Major Motoko Kusanagi donning thermoptic camouflage in Mamoro Oshii's adaptation of Shirow Masamune's manga, "Ghost in the Shell" (USA: Production I. G., March 29, 1996).
Image credit: Giant Gingko - Thermo Optic Camouflage

The sweeping technological changes that have taken place during the past several generations are in keeping with the prediction some two thousand years ago in the Zohar, a classical text of mysticism, stating that in the year 1840, there would be an outburst of “lower wisdom,” or advancements in the physical universe, and an increase in “sublime wisdom,” or spirituality, would begin to usher true unity into the world, leading toward the final redemption.

The increase in both types of wisdom—wisdom of the mind and wisdom of the soul—has surely come to pass; where we have fallen short is in integrating these spheres of knowledge. Only by balancing the scientific with the spiritual can we transform the dream of an ideal future into a functional blueprint for society, for true communication can begin only when human minds and souls interact. With communication comes understanding; with understanding comes compassion; and with compassion comes a natural movement toward universalism.

So the current technological revolution is in fact the hand of G-d at work; it is meant to help us make G-d a reality in our lives. And as time goes on, science will show itself more and more to parallel the truths of G-d, thereby revealing the intrinsic unity in the entire universe.

The divine purpose of the present information revolution, for instance, which gives an individual unprecedented power and opportunity, is to allow us to share knowledge—spiritual knowledge—with each other, empowering and unifying individuals everywere. We need to use today’s interactive technology not just for business or leisure but to interlink as people – to create a welcome environment for the interaction of our souls, our hearts, our visions.

There is much to learn from the technological revolution, as long as we understand its role in our lives and see it as a final step in our dramatic search for unity throughout the universe. After all, developments in science and technology have taught us to be more sensitive to the intangible and the sublime: the forces behind computers, telephones, television, and so on are all invisible, and yet we fully recognize their power and reach. Similarly, we must come to accept that the driving force behind the entire universe is intangible and sublime, and we must come to experience the transcendent and G-dly in every single thing — beginning, of course with ourselves.

With all our human capacity for technological advancement, we must never forget our higher objective. We must strive to enhance our scientific search for truth by constantly expanding our spiritual search for the divine.
– Menachem Mendel Schneerson in Toward a Meaningful Life: The Wisdom of the Rebbe, adapted by Simon Jacobson, (Thorndike, Maine: G.K. Hall, 1996), p. 190. First published (New York: William Morrow, 1995). Cited in part in “An Interactive Dialogue: Talmud and the Net” by Mel Alexenberg in Parabola, Volume 29, Number 2, “Web of Life”, (Mt. Kisco, New York: Tamarack Press, Summer 2004), p. 32.

"In Bed: The Kiss" by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1892)
Image credit: Art Blog by Bob - A Kiss to Build a Dream On

And then she kissed him on the mouth. It was one of those Russian kisses, the sort that are exchanged in that vast, soulful land at high Christian feasts, as a token and seal of love. But even as we record this kiss exchanged between a notoriously “subtle” young man and a charming, slinking, and still equally young woman, we cannot help finding in it a reminder of Dr. Krokowski’s elaborate, if not always unobjectionable way of speaking about love in a gently irresolute sense, so that one was never quite sure whether he meant its sanctified or more passionate and fleshly forms. Are we doing the same thing here, or were Hans Castorp and Clavdia Chauchat doing the same with their Russian kiss? But what would be our readers’ reaction if we simply refused to get to the bottom of that question? In our opinion, it is analytically correct, although—to use Hans Castorp’s phrase—”terribly gauche” and downright life-denying, to make a “tidy” distinction between sanctity and passion in matters of love. What’s this about “tidy”? What’s this about gentle irresolution and ambiguity? Isn’t it grand, isn’t it good, that language has only one word for everything we associate with love – from utter sanctity to the most fleshly lust? The result is perfect clarity in ambiguity, for love cannot be disembodied even in its most sanctified forms, nor is it without sanctity even at its most fleshly. Love is always simply itself, both as a subtle affirmation of life and as the highest passion; love is our sympathy with organic life, the touchingly lustful embrace of what is destined to decay – caritas is assuredly found in the most admirable and most depraved passions. Irresolute? But in God’s good name, leave the meaning of love unresolved! Unresolved – that is life and humanity, and it would betray a dreary lack of subtlety to worry about it.
– Thomas Mann in The Magic Mountain, translated by John Edwin Woods, (New York: A.A. Knopf, 2005), p. 713. Originally published as Der Zauberberg. Roman., (Berlin: S. Fischer, 1924).

The Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (Washington, D.C.: August 28, 1963).
Image credit: U. S. News and World Report, The Library of Congress, Wikipedia.

We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of Now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God’s children.

It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment. This sweltering summer of the Negro’s legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. Nineteen sixty-three is not an end, but a beginning. And those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. And there will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.

But there is something that I must say to my people, who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice: In the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again, we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.

The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to a distrust of all white people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny. And they have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom.

We cannot walk alone.

And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead.

We cannot turn back.
– Martin Luther King, Jr. in his “I Have a Dream” speech delivered during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (Lincoln Memorial, Washington, D. C.: August 28, 1963). Full text of speech available at American Rhetoric and Project Gutenberg. Full audio recordings of speech in many formats available at The Internet Archive.

Buffalo in Badlands National Park (Interior, South Dakota: May 19, 2005).
Photograph by: Gregory Foster

Behold, my friends, the spring is come; the earth has gladly received the embraces of the sun, and we shall soon see the results of their love! Every seed is awakened, and all animal life. It is through this mysterious power that we too have our being, and we therefore yield to our neighbors, even to our animal neighbors, the same right as ourselves to inhabit this vast land.

Yet hear me friends! we now have to deal with another people, small and feeble when our forefathers first met with them, but now great and overbearing. Strangely enough, they have a mind to till the soil, and the love of possesions is a disease in them. These people have made many rules that the rich may break but the poor may not! They even take tithes of the poor and weak to support the rich and those who rule. They claim this mother of ours, the Earth, for their own use, and fence their neighbors away from her, and deface her with their buildings and their refuse. They compel her to produce out of season, and when sterile she is made to take medicine in order to produce again. All this is sacrilege.

This nation is like a spring freshet; it overruns its banks and destroys all who are in its path. We cannot dwell side by side. Only seven years ago we made a treaty by which we were assured that the buffalo country should be left to us forever. Now they threaten to take that from us also. My brothers, shall we submit? or shall we say to them: “First kill me, before you can take possession of my fatherland!”
– Tatanka Yotanka (Sitting Bull; Lakotah: Tȟatȟáŋka Íyotake), Lakotah Sioux chief, speaking before a Native American council at Powder River, as related to Charles Alexander Eastman (Ohiyesa) “by men who were present,” (South Dakota: Spring 1877). Available in Charles Alexander Eastman’s Indian Heroes and Great Chieftains, (Boston, Massachusetts: Little, Brown, and Company, 1918), p. 119.

The intersection of Church Street and State Avenue.
Image credit: Project Tolerance - Political Philosophy

Liberalism privileges tolerance because it is committed to fallibilism, the idea that our opinions about the world, derived as they are from the local, limited perspectives in which we necessarily live, are likely to be in error when—again, especially when—we are wholly committed to them. If God or God’s representative is removed as the guarantor of right judgement, all that remains is the judgement of fallible men and women who will be pretending to divinity whenever they confuse what seems to them to be true for what is really true. Because this mistake is natural to us, because the beliefs we acquire always seem to us to be perspicuous and indubitable, it is necessary, liberalism tells us, to put obstacles in the way of our assenting too easily to what are finally only our opinions. One way to do this is to institutionalize [John Stuart] Mill‘s advice and to require, as a matter of principle, a diversity of views with respect to any question. The New York Times v. Sullivan decision quotes with approval Judge Learned Hand‘s declaration that in essence the First Amendment “presupposes that right conclusions are more likely to be gathered out of a multitude of tongues, than through any kind of authoritative selection.” Typically, those who make pronouncements like this assume (without saying so) that the tongues making up the multitude will belong to persons who are committed to the protocols of rational inquiry; frivolous persons, persons who exploit those protocols or play with them to gain political ends, are not imagined. (When [Gerald] Graff counsels “teach the controversy,” he means the real controversy, not the manufactured ones.) But nothing in a statement like Hand’s rules them out, and once “authoritative selection” has been discounted and even rendered suspect because of its necessarily fallible origins, there is no reason at all for excluding any voice no matter how outlandish its assertions. After all, who’s to say?
– Stanley Fish in his essay “Academic Cross-Dressing: How Intelligent Design gets its arguments from the left” in Harper’s Magazine, (New York: Harper’s Magazine Foundation, December 2005), p. 71-72.

Related Media: Trailer for documentary “Truth in Numbers: Everything, According to Wikipedia”

Harry Houdini escaping a straitjacket while suspended upside down in Manhattan (Broadway and 46th Street, New York: 1907).
Image credit: Ephemeral New York - When Houdini hung upside-down over Broadway

My brain is the key that sets me free.
– Harry Houdini, a favorite saying frequently cited when signing books, photographs, playing cards, etc.

Dangerous Crossing: The Revolutionary Voyage of John Quincy Adams by Stephen Krensky with illustrations by Greg Harlin (New York: Dutton Children's Books, 2005).
Image credit: Amazon.com

Some author, that I have met with, compares a judicious traveller to a river, that increases its stream the further it flows from its source; or to certain springs, which, running through rich veins of minerals, improve their qualities as they pass along. It will be expected of you, my son, that, as you are favored with superior advantages under the instructive eye of a tender parent, your improvement should bear some proportion to your advantages. Nothing is wanting with you but attention, diligence, and steady application. Nature has not been deficient.

These are times in which a genius would wish to live. It is not in the still calm of life, or the repose of a pacific station, that great characters are formed. Would Cicero have shone so distinguished an orator if he had not been roused, kindled, and inflamed by the tyranny of Catiline, Verres, and Mark Anthony? The habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties. All history will convince you of this, and that wisdom and penetration are the fruit of experience, not the lessons of retirement and leisure. Great necessities call out great virtues. When a mind is raised and animated by scenes that engage the heart, then those qualities, which would otherwise lie dormant, wake into life and form the character of the hero and the statesman.
– Abigail Adams in a letter to her son John Quincy Adams (January 12, 1780). Available in Letters of Mrs. Adams, The Wife of John Adams. With an introductory memoir by her grandson, Charles Francis Adams, edited by Charles Francis Adams, Edition 4, (Boston, Massachusetts: Wilkins, Carter, and Company, 1848), p. 111.

Roadtrip, Solarized (near Socorro, New Mexico: April 3, 2010 4:42:57 pm).
Photograph by: Gregory Foster

“Well, you have these questions. You young men have taken this LSD and you have a lot of questions. You saw something. And it’s hard to put whatever you saw out of your minds. But let me tell you how, in my experience, life works—how it works for a man.

“For a man there’s an order in life. First he needs to get himself a good truck, and by that I mean a job—something he’s naturally good at that earns him a living and connects him with the world, with other people. First, a good truck.

“After that, with any luck he attracts a good woman. Maybe he’s got to look for one and maybe one just shows up. They’re around. But you need to go at life in the proper order to be sure of finding one. If you mix up the order, things get harder. Maybe you find the woman first and then the truck, or maybe you don’t find much of anything. Either way, putting these big questions you like to ask before you get your truck can be risky. You’re apt to never find very much you can live by. Very big answers have a way of slipping through very small fingers. You know, boys, a man can get stuck looking at the cosmos, as you call it, or at other men’s wives. Sometimes a person doesn’t end up with a real grasp of the big things he thinks he’s after, and doesn’t get the most basic things right, either.

“A man needs what he really needs. No one can change that. First, get yourself a truck. Then a good woman. After that, you’ll be surprised how these other things, the cosmos and everything, find a way of working themselves out. Then you can question things from a patch of ground that you’ve earned, and everything means more to you. From his own patch of ground a man can see a long way.”
– “Oldie” Hutchinson, father of “Lost John” Hutchinson in James Opie‘s “For A Man There’s An Order In Life” in Parabola, Volume 32, Number 4, (Mt. Kisco, New York: Tamarack Press, Winter 2007), p. 47. Also available in Utne Reader, (Minneapolis, Minnesota: LENS Publishing Co., March 1, 2008).

"Crossing the Rubicon" by Triola (Trine Lise Olaussen).
Image credit: Elftown - Triola Portfolio

Half the failures in life arise from pulling in the horse as he is leaping.
– Augustus William Hare in Guesses at Truth by Two Brothers: The First Volume, written with Julius Charles Hare (London: Published for John Taylor by James Duncan, 1827), p. 137. Thanks to Maggie Duval for the introduction.

Image depicting a gravitational lens formed by a planet's curvature of spacetime.
Image credit: Hyper-Mathematics - Uzayzaman / Spacetime

The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of mystery—even if mixed with fear—that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds – it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man. I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the kind that we experience in ourselves. Neither can I nor would I want to conceive of an individual who survives his physical death; let feeble souls, from fear or absurd egoism, cherish such thoughts. I am satisfied with the mystery of the eternity of life and with the awareness and a glimpse of the marvelous structure of the existing world, together with the devoted striving to comprehend a portion, be it ever so tiny, of the reason that manifests itself in nature.
– Albert Einstein in the conclusion of his essay “The World As I See It” (1931). First published in Forum and Century, Volume 84, (New York: Forum Publishing Company, 1931), p. 193-4. Subsequently published in Living Philosophies, edited by Henry Goddard Leach, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1931), p. 3-7. Also available in Albert Einstein, edited by Jim Green, (Melbourne; New York: Ocean Press, 2003), p. 27.

Leonardo da Vinci sand sculpture (Revere Beach, Revere, Massachusetts: 2007).
Photograph by: Rick Macomber.
Image credit: snowriderguy

The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, scepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin. And it cannot be otherwise, for every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority, the cherishing of the keenest scepticism, the annihilation of the spirit of blind faith; and the most ardent votary of science holds his firmest convictions, not because the men he most venerates holds them; not because their verity is testified by portents and wonders; but because his experience teaches him that whenever he chooses to bring these convictions into contact with their primary source, Nature—whenever he thinks fit to test them by appealing to experiment and to observations—Nature will confirm them. The man of science has learned to believe in justification, not by faith, but by verification.
– Thomas Henry Huxley in his “Sunday Evenings for the People” lay sermon “On the Adviseableness of improving Natural Knowledge”, (St. Martin’s Hall, London: January 7, 1866). First published in Fortnightly Review, Volume 3, (London: Chapman and Hall, 1866), p. 626-37. Available in Lay Sermons, Addresses, and Reviews, (London: Macmillan and Co., 1870), p. 21.

"The Ecology Man" by Sam Haskins (Linz, Austria: Modern Times Media, 2007)

[Thomas] Merton‘s letter to [Rachel] Carson, which he marked for inclusion as an appendix to his so-called “Cold War Letters,” succinctly summarizes the situation as Merton saw it and served as a springboard for the many other reflections on technology and ecology that would weave themselves in and out of his writings for the next six years.

First of all, he notes that there is a strange and perplexing paradoxical contradiction seemingly inherent in the inter-relationships of technology and ecology. There is the same mental process involved (Merton notes to Carson that he had almost written “mental illness” instead of process) in the human person’s irresponsible propensity to “scorn the smallest values” while daring to use “our titanic power in a way that threatens not only civilization but life itself.” This vicious circle of suicidal actions is repeated in our very attempts to cure the illness: “…it seems that our remedies are instinctively those which aggravate the sickness: the remedies are expressions of the sickness itself“.[1][2]

There is a type of death wish, a Thantos Syndrome as Walker Percy termed it in his final novel, built right into humankind’s most fundamental being. Merton compares it to the Christian concept of original sin, but notes that no matter what one’s “dogmatic convictions,” humans almost universally possess a “tendency to destroy and negate” themselves just “when everything is at its best, and that it is just when things are paradisiacal that” we use our technological powers in a horrifyingly destructive manner.[3] Thus, there is a hatred of life lurking right under the surface of our optimism about ourselves and about our affluent society. But the economics, culture, philosophy of affluence is itself so self-defeating, contains “so many built-in frustrations” of its own that it “inevitably leads us to despair.”[4] The “awful fruit of this despair” is even more “indiscriminate, irresponsible destructiveness” and “hatred of life” (including hatred directed towards the natural world) to the point that in order “to ‘survive’ we instinctively destroy that on which our survival depends.”[5] Furthermore, this destructive activity not only savages the natural resources of the world around us, it also eradicates the religious, spiritual systems that have for thousands of years assisted humans in maintaining a healthy balance between themselves and the planet on which they live. In the words of Donald P. St. John, “The technological system that has shattered nature’s system of checks and balances, and promised godlike powers to humans, has simultaneously eroded cultural systems which generate virtues and a perennial wisdom that attempted to guard humanity from its own excesses.”[6]
– Ezekiel Lotz in his speech “Thomas Merton and Technology: Paradise Regained Re-lost” presented at the Gethsemani III conference (The Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani, Bardstown, Kentucky: Monastic Interreligious Dialogue, May 27, 2008).

Footnotes

[1] Thomas Merton in Witness to Freedom: The letters of Thomas Merton in times of Crisis, edited by William Henry Shannon, (San Diego, California: Harcourt Brace, 1995), p. 71. First published (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1994).
[2] Also note Merton’s journal entry for December 11, 1962 in reference to wanting to obtain and read Carson’s book: “Someone will say: you worry about birds: why not worry about people? I worry about both birds and people. We are in the world and are part of it and we are destroying everything because we are destroying ourselves, spiritually, morally and in every way. It is all part of the same sickness, and it all hangs together.” Available in The Journals of Thomas Merton, Volume 4, Turning Toward the World (1960-1963): The pivotal years, edited by Victor Kramer, (San Francisco, California: HarperSanFrancisco, 1997), p. 274f.
[3] Thomas Merton in Witness to Freedom, p. 71.
[4] ibid., p. 71.
[5] ibid., p. 71.
[6] Donald P. St. John in “Technological culture and contemplative ecology in Thomas Merton’s Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander“, in Worldviews: Global Religions, Culture, and Ecology, Volume 6, Issue 2, (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2002), p. 166.

New work by A. Andrew Gonzalez
Available at the "Psychedelia and Fantastic Realism" exhibition (San Antonio, Texas: Long Hall Gallery, June 26 - August 14, 2010)

Something profound, unexpected, nearly unimaginable awaits us if we will turn our investigative attentions toward the phenomenon of shamanic plant hallucinogens. The people outside of Western history, those still in the dream time of preliteracy, have kept the flame of a tremendous mystery burning. It will be humbling to admit this and to learn from them, but that too is a part of the Archaic Revival.

This is not to imply that we must stand slack-jawed before the accomplishments of the “primitive” in yet another version of the Noble Savage Cha-Cha. Everyone who has worked in the field is aware of the frequent clash between our expectations of how “true rainforest people” should behave and the realities of tribal daily life. No one yet understands the mysterious intelligence within plants or the implications of the idea that nature communicates in a basic chemical language that is unconscious but profound. We do not yet understand how hallucinogens transform the message in the unconscious into revelations beheld by the conscious mind. As archaic people honed their intuitions and their senses by using whatever plants were at hand to increase their adaptive advantage, they had little time for philosophy. To this day the implications of the existence of this mind within nature discovered by shamanic peoples have yet to fully dawn.

Meanwhile, quietly and outside of history, shamanism has pursued its dialogue with an invisible world. Shamanism’s legacy can act as a steadying force to redirect our awareness toward the collective fate of the biosphere. The shamanic faith is that humanity is not without allies. There are forces friendly to our struggle to birth ourselves as an intelligent species. But they are quiet and shy; they are to be sought, not in the arrival of alien star fleets in the skies of earth, but nearby, in wilderness solitude, in the ambience of waterfalls, and yes, in the grasslands and pastures now too rarely beneath our feet.
– Terence McKenna in Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge: A radical history of plants, drugs, and human evolution, (New York: Bantam Books, February 1993), p. 13. First published (New York: Bantam Books, March 1992).

Related Media: Video of wind and grass (Knowth, Ireland)