Looking at the mat and cushion on the floor of the room today, it looked like a place. Another room from the room it is in.
Meditation is another room. Whether you meditate for one of the simple reasons or as part of a greater practice and program, it is another room.
Whatever room you are in, in small apartment or a mansion, there is another room that has no walls, ceiling or floor (yes, that makes it hard to sit on a mat!), encompassing everyone and everything. As a bonus, rent-free and mortgage-free.
You are not going to stay there, as you live in all the other rooms—in your house, office, stores, or whatever. But a visit to this other room, seeing all it holds and reveals, can be inspiring (literally meaning breathing in).
We had the best education. We went to school every day. I only took the regular course. Reeling and Writhing to begin with. Then the different branches of Arithmetic—Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Read Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland now. Again if it’s been a while, and definitely now if for the first time.
Lewis Carroll (born Charles Dodgson, 1832-1898) was famously creative as a mathematician and logician. He wove puzzles and tortured logic all through his book Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
Puzzles and tortured logic are a major component of America in 2025.
The leadership and the citizens of Wonderland are variously tyrannical, illogical, stupid, or just plain bizarre. Alice literally does not fit in. While she is only a child, she has more sense than everyone she meets combined.
If I had a news network I’d suspend the futile attempts to explain what’s going on and would instead read aloud one chapter from Alice in Wonderland every day. It would be more constructive and more fun than listening to their trying to make sense of the nonsensical.
Trump’s posts and speeches seem to be taken straight from Alice in Wonderland:
For example:
We must have a trial. Really this morning I have nothing to do. With no jury or judge I’ll be Judge. I’ll be jury. I’ll try the whole cause and condemn you to death.
We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad. A dog growls when it’s angry and wags its tail when it’s pleased. Now I growl when I’m pleased and wag my tail when I’m angry. Therefore I’m mad.
Be what you would seem to be. Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.
You have no right to think. Just about as much right as pigs have to fly. I give you fair warning either you or your head must be off. Take your choice!
We had the best education. We went to school every day. I only took the regular course. Reeling and Writhing to begin with. Then the different branches of Arithmetic—Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision.
Thus it began: Someone running late to the airport asked me to find a patron saint to help their making a flight.
My view of saints is nuanced. I believe that the long roster of Christian saints offers valuable spiritual touchstones for people of all traditions. Belief in the underlying miracles or in the power of a particular saint to intervene in particular situations is another matter. For me, saints are much more than a curiosity, but less than a holy emissary. Still, important and worthwhile.
I found Saint Joseph of Cupertino. Even for saints and their various patronages, he is extraordinary. Based on his life, he is the patron saint of air travelers, aviators, astronauts, people with mental handicaps, test takers, and poor students. That covers a lot of ground:
Saint Joseph of Cupertino (1603-1663) was an Italian Franciscan friar known for mystical levitation experiences during prayer and Mass. Born Giuseppe Desa in Cupertino, Italy, he had a difficult childhood marked by poverty and learning difficulties.
Despite initial rejections due to his lack of education, he eventually became a priest. He became famous for reportedly levitating into ecstatic trances during religious services—sometimes floating to the altar or rising into the air—which drew crowds and scrutiny from Church authorities. These episodes occurred so frequently that he was eventually forbidden from participating in public religious ceremonies.
This led me to a little-known and less-seen movie based on his life, The Reluctant Saint (1962). Made by veteran Hollywood director Edward Dymtyrk, it is modest and well-made.
As his life story and the film (and the poster above referring to “The Flying Friar”) detail, the most remarkable feature was his ability to levitate. This is how the airplane aspects of his patronage came to pass.
If you watch the movie, or at least the last fifteen minutes, you will see a hearing about Joseph’s levitating above the altar when he celebrated his first mass. The brothers testify to what they witnessed, but one priest, Father Raspi, is adamant that it is the work of the devil possessing Father Joseph.
Father Raspi performs an exorcism (21 years before The Exorcist movie), including wrapping Joseph in chains so that he cannot levitate. When it is over, he leaves Joseph in chains. As Father Raspi and the brothers leave, they hear the chains falling away. When they go back, they are struck by a blinding bright light.
This story of Saint Joseph of Cupertino will inspire different thoughts in different people.
Did a humble, simple-minded, possibly mentally-challenged man pass his priest examination with flying colors? Did that same man, lifted by spirit, levitate?
Did this saint help someone make a flight on time?
Many people have things to hide. Many of those people hide them with lies, distractions, obscurities, payoffs, threats or punishments.
Even some, maybe many, of his supporters suspect that Trump has things to hide, though those supporters may think he, good man that he is, is hiding them for good reasons.
Trump has managed to hide things or explain away whatever was seen as inconsequential or often as fake.
He knows, and those who know him know, that the door marked “E” is turning out to be a challenge. Which explains how much effort has gone into to keeping it closed and blocking the view.
In criminal law, when a defendant or witness invokes the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, the instruction to the jury is that it may not infer guilt from that silence.
In life outside the courtroom, when someone tries to block the view of what actually happened, we do infer something from it. There is some possibility, we reasonably think, that blocking the view means that someone is hiding something.
The door marked “E” is opening a crack. We may see more if the congressional demand for complete FBI files is complied with, but there are many possible and likely obstacles to that.
Trump has managed to keep all other doors into his life closed so far, and has been very successful at it. If and when we get this door opened and see it all, we may be both astonished and unsurprised.
At that moment, the sun was to the left of the picture, out of sight, having already disappeared from view. In another moment, the light and medium gray was dark gray and the pink was gone. Then the dark gray was black. The sun will remain out of view for hours, when it will reappear yellow. At that moment.
“One of the world’s great thinkers…. in the last 20 years of his life he became an officially forgotten, troublesome figure. This position obscures the true importance of his contribution.” Guardian obituary of Ivan Illich, 8 December 2002
“The hypothesis on which the experiment was built must now be discarded. The hypothesis was that machines can replace slaves. The evidence shows that, used for this purpose, machines enslave men.” Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality (1973)
If you have heard of Ivan Illich or include him in your conversations, you are in a small minority. His published critiques of major institutions—education, medicine, technology—had the establishment and those increasingly dominant institutions treating him as a “troublesome” marginal thinker. When you read Illich today, however, he comes across like a prophet. Prophets are almost always troublemakers.
Ivan Illich, who has died of cancer aged 76, was one of the world’s great thinkers, a polymath whose output covered vast terrains. He worked in 10 languages; he was a jet-age ascetic with few possessions; he explored Asia and South America on foot; and his obligations to his many collaborators led to a constant criss-crossing of the globe in the last two decades.
Best known for his polemical writings against western institutions from the 1970s, which were easily caricatured by the right and were, equally, disdained by the left for their attacks on the welfare state, in the last 20 years of his life he became an officially forgotten, troublesome figure. This position obscures the true importance of his contribution….
Illich was born in Vienna into a family with Jewish, Dalmatian and Catholic roots. His was an errant life, and he never found a home again after his family had to leave Vienna in 1941. He was educated in that city and then in Florence before reading histology and crystallography at Florence University.
He decided to enter the priesthood and studied theology and philosophy at the Vatican’s Gregorian University from 1943 to 1946. He started work as a priest in an Irish and Puerto Rican parish in New York, popularizing the church through close contact with the Latino community and respect for their traditions. He applied these same methods on a larger scale when, in 1956, he was appointed vice-rector of the Catholic University of Puerto Rico, and later, in 1961, as founder of the Centro Intercultural de Documentación (CIDOC) at Cuernavaca in Mexico, a broad-based research center which offered courses and briefings for missionaries arriving from North America….
Illich retained a lifelong base in Cuernavaca, but travelled constantly from this point on. His intellectual activity in the 1970s and 1980s focused on major institutions of the industrialized world. In seven concise, non-academic books he addressed education (Deschooling Society, 1971), technological development (Tools For Conviviality, 1973), energy, transport and economic development (Energy And Equity, 1974), medicine (Medical Nemesis, 1976) and work (The Right To Useful Unemployment And Its Professional Enemies, 1978, and Shadow Work, 1981). He analyzed the corruption of institutions which, he said, ended up by performing the opposite of their original purpose….
Illich lived frugally, but opened his doors to collaborators and drop-ins with great generosity, running a practically non-stop educational process which was always celebratory, open-ended and egalitarian at his final bases in Bremen, Cuernavaca and Pennsylvania.
Ivan Illich, thinker, born September 4 1926; died December 2 2002
I have been rereading Tools for Conviviality, especially in light of the overwhelming AI phenomenon, and find it as insightful as anything I’ve read—even though it was written more than fifty years ago and it doesn’t directly address AI. Great thinking from great thinkers always ages well.
The symptoms of accelerated crisis are widely recognized. Multiple attempts have been made to explain them. I believe that this crisis is rooted in a major twofold experiment which has failed, and I claim that the resolution of the crisis begins with a recognition of the failure. For a hundred years we have tried to make machines work for men and to school men for life in their service. Now it turns out that machines do not “work” and that people cannot be schooled for a life at the service of machines. The hypothesis on which the experiment was built must now be discarded. The hypothesis was that machines can replace slaves. The evidence shows that, used for this purpose, machines enslave men. Neither a dictatorial proletariat nor a leisure mass can escape the dominion of constantly expanding industrial tools.
The crisis can be solved only if we learn to invert the present deep structure of tools; if we give people tools that guarantee their right to work with high, independent efficiency, thus simultaneously eliminating the need for either slaves or masters and enhancing each person’s range of freedom. People need new tools to work with rather than tools that “work” for them. They need technology to make the most of the energy and imagination each has, rather than more well-programmed energy slaves….
I here submit the concept of a multidimensional balance of human life which can serve as a framework for evaluating man’s relation to his tools. In each of several dimensions of this balance it is possible to identify a natural scale. When an enterprise grows beyond a certain point on this scale, it first frustrates the end for which it was originally designed, and then rapidly becomes a threat to society itself. These scales must be identified and the parameters of human endeavors within which human life remains viable must be explored.
Society can be destroyed when further growth of mass production renders the milieu hostile, when it extinguishes the free use of the natural abilities of society’s members, when it isolates people from each other and locks them into a man-made shell, when it undermines the texture of community by promoting extreme social polarization and splintering specialization, or when cancerous acceleration enforces social change at a rate that rules out legal, cultural, and political precedents as formal guidelines to present behavior. Corporate endeavors which thus threaten society cannot be tolerated. At this point it becomes irrelevant whether an enterprise is nominally owned by individuals, corporations, or the state, because no form of management can make such fundamental destruction serve a social purpose….
It is now difficult to imagine a modern society in which industrial growth is balanced and kept in check by several complementary, distinct, and equally scientific modes of production. Our vision of the possible and the feasible is so restricted by industrial expectations that any alternative to more mass production sounds like a return to past oppression or like a Utopian design for noble savages. In fact, however, the vision of new possibilities requires only the recognition that scientific discoveries can be used in at least two opposite ways. The first leads to specialization of functions, institutionalization of values and centralization of power and turns people into the accessories of bureaucracies or machines. The second enlarges the range of each person’s competence, control, and initiative, limited only by other individuals’ claims to an equal range of power and freedom.
To formulate a theory about a future society both very modern and not dominated by industry, it will be necessary to recognize natural scales and limits. We must come to admit that only within limits can machines take the place of slaves; beyond these limits they lead to a new kind of serfdom. Only within limits can education fit people into a man-made environment: beyond these limits lies the universal schoolhouse, hospital ward, or prison. Only within limits ought politics to be concerned with the distribution of maximum industrial outputs, rather than with equal inputs of either energy or information. Once these limits are recognized, it becomes possible to articulate the triadic relationship between persons, tools, and a new collectivity. Such a society, in which modern technologies serve politically interrelated individuals rather than managers, I will call “convivial.”
After many doubts, and against the advice of friends whom I respect, I have chosen “convivial” as a technical term to designate a modern society of responsibly limited tools…. I am aware that in English “convivial” now seeks the company of tipsy jollyness, which is distinct from that indicated by the OED and opposite to the austere meaning of modern “eutrapelia,” which I intend. By applying the term “convivial” to tools rather than to people, I hope to forestall confusion.
“Austerity,” which says something about people, has also been degraded and has acquired a bitter taste, while for Aristotle or Aquinas it marked the foundation of friendship. In the Summa Theologica, II, II, in the 186th question, article 5, Thomas deals with disciplined and creative playfulness. In his third response he defines “austerity” as a virtue which does not exclude all enjoyments, but only those which are distracting from or destructive of personal relatedness. For Thomas “austerity” is a complementary part of a more embracing virtue, which he calls friendship or joyfulness. It is the fruit of an apprehension that things or tools could destroy rather than enhance eutrapelia (or graceful playfulness) in personal relations.
“We realize, hey, our churches and the people in our churches have been duped by this guy and so rather than hope someone else will clean up the problem, what we’ve seen is a lot of pastors respond with, you know what, I’m going to jump in and I’m going to be a part of the solution.” Robb Ryerse in Arkansas, Christian pastor and former Republican, one of 30 Christian white clergy so far running as Democrats in the midterm elections.
Churches in America have taken different positions regarding Trump.
Some have vigorously supported him, going so far as to say he is an anointed savior for the nation. Trump does, after all, sell his own God Bless the USA Bible.
Some, particularly black churches, have vigorously opposed him.
Most churches have stayed on the sidelines. The main reason is that in this divided society, congregations often include supporters and opponents. In those congregations, the position is that the church serves as an elevated neutral ground, not a battlefield, interested in promoting and effectuating the highest principles of Jesus and the Gospels. Whether or not those principles are being advanced or decimated in the public sphere by the chief public executive. Whether or not the tax dollars of congregants are being used to help or hurt people. Besides, a divisive message might send some congregants running away.
He grew up on a farm in Indiana, the son of a factory worker and eldest of five children. He studied at Liberty, a Christian university founded by the conservative pastor and televangelist Jerry Falwell, and recalls wearing a T-shirt expressing opposition to Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry.
Two decades later, Justin Douglas is running for the US Congress – as a Democrat.
He is among around 30 Christian white clergy – pastors, seminary students and other faith leaders – known to be potential Democratic candidates in next year’s midterm elections, including a dozen who are already in the race. While stressing the separation of church and state, many say that on a personal level their faith is calling them into the political arena….
In Arkansas, Robb Ryerse, a Christian pastor and former Republican, is mounting a challenge to representative Steve Womack, adopting the slogan “Faith, Family & Freedom” – rhetoric more commonly found in Republican campaign literature.
Ryerse, 50, from Springdale, Arkansas, said: “I joke sometimes that the two people who have changed my life more than any others are Jesus and Donald Trump, for very different reasons. Donald Trump is absolutely inconsistent with Christian principles of love and compassion, justice, looking out for the poor, meeting the needs of the marginalized.
“But Donald Trump has also used and been used by so many evangelical leaders who want political power. He has used them to validate him to their followers and they have used him to further their agenda, which has been a Christian nationalist culture war on the United States, which I think is bad for both the church and for the country.”
White clergy are deciding to run for office, Ryerse believes, in part as a response to the rise of Christian nationalism and the reality that, according to a Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) survey, Trump won 85% of the white evangelical vote in last year’s presidential election.
Ryerse said: “We realize, hey, our churches and the people in our churches have been duped by this guy and so rather than hope someone else will clean up the problem, what we’ve seen is a lot of pastors respond with, you know what, I’m going to jump in and I’m going to be a part of the solution.
“On a more positive note, there’s also that notion we need to do something for the common good. There’s so much alignment between what I believe personally is good for my neighbor, what it means to love my neighbor, and how that aligns with what public policy ought to be.”
We can influence others. We can educate others. We can inspire others. We might even punish others.
We can’t forcefully change others, as much as we want to and sometimes desperately try to.
It is like trying to change the weather. We are very good at adapting to weather. Even better than adapting to others, unlike with the weather, we can influence, educate and inspire others, in ways that may lead to a positive affirming change in them. If, of course, we are sure we know what that change would be.
We can curse the rain all day. Better to grab an umbrella.
Just before our love got lost you said “I am as constant as a northern star” And I said, “Constantly in the darkness Where’s that at? If you want me I’ll be in the bar” Joni Mitchell, A Case of You
Joni Mitchell has 2.8 million monthly listeners on Spotify.
Taylor Swift has 106 million monthly listeners on Spotify.
Does that mean that Taylor is 37 times better than Joni?
No. It means that 103 million listeners are missing something every month.
The good news is that those 103 million listeners have an opportunity to listen to what they are missing. Without even having to give up Taylor.
Win-Win.
A Case of You from the Blue album is considered one of Joni Mitchell’s best tracks. Also considered by some one of the best love songs ever. The song has been covered by over 300 artists.
Just before our love got lost you said “I am as constant as a northern star” And I said, “Constantly in the darkness Where’s that at? If you want me I’ll be in the bar”
On the back of a cartoon coaster In the blue TV screen light I drew a map of Canada Oh, Canada With your face sketched on it twice
Oh, I am a lonely painter I live in a box of paints I’m frightened by the devil And I’m drawn to those ones that ain’t afraid
I remember that time you told me You said, “Love is touching souls” Surely you touched mine ‘Cause part of you pours out of me In these lines from time to time
I met a woman She had a mouth like yours She knew your life She knew your devils and your deeds And she said, “Go to him, stay with him if you can But be prepared to bleed”
Oh, but you are in my blood You’re my holy wine You’re so bitter Bitter and so sweet Oh, I could drink a case of you, darling Still I’d be on my feet I would still be on my feet
Bob Schwartz 