Take a Break From Politics

The rains haven’t come yet, but the leaves have begun to turn—yellows mostly. It’s early autumn in California, and the winds have cleared and cleaned the air after months of depressing smoke and toxic haze. For a half hour, sunlight streams through the trees and onto the spot where I sit beside the creek. There is timelessness and peace.

Have you noticed that there are a few days of the year that stand out in their beauty? Today was one of those days, which occur only once or twice per season in my experience.

As self-involved humans, it’s hard to be sure that one isn’t merely having a good day, or in a good mood. I don’t think so though, since one’s mood and self-concern is emptied and forgotten by the beauty of the Earth on such days.

I pedal out beyond the new construction to look at the canyon and foothills, which are breathtakingly vivid in a cloudless sky. A young man in hardhat exits a trailer-office as I pull over. He says hello, and I comment on how clear the hills are.

“Yes, I live up there,” he replies, pointing up beyond the canyon that forms Upper Park, “and this is as clear as I’ve ever seen them.” He’s the son of the owner of the construction company, and he seems to fit the role and not fit it at the same time.

Though we’re standing at least six feet apart, he pulls up a scarf-like mask as we talk. I reach into my pocket and put on a surgical mask. I ask what it’s like around Paradise Lake, my favorite place to meditate before the fire that incinerated the town two years ago, and he says some logging has taken place there.

I give him my card, and we talk about having a beer outdoors at a bar. I take a last look at the brown, shimmering hills, and ride back.

This damn pandemic makes you appreciate little human exchanges a lot more. I can count on one hand the times I’ve exchanged more than a few passing words with strangers in the last few months.

There are two primal fears all people share. The first is being socially outcast, since for thousands of years in the wilderness before so-called civilization, ostracization meant death. 

The second, and directly related inwardly, is leaving the known. The known once meant the accretion over uncounted generations of culture and tradition, of beliefs about animal spirits and human relationships embedded in the natural world—entirely orally transmitted.

Since the invention of writing, knowledge and the known (not the same thing) were also transmitted by tablets and parchment, and then books after the invention of the printing press, and now digitally, which is encompassing virtually all human knowledge and experience.

It is extremely rare for anyone to leave the stream of the known, so rare that I wonder how many people even know what I’m talking about.

In the simplest terms, leaving the stream of the known means a spontaneous stillness of mind, the cessation of thinking and thought, and the ending of the continuity of psychological memory.

These are words, not the thing. The actuality is an acute state of awareness, which occurs when passive watchfulness gathers sufficient attention—a very different thing than concentration.

These two primal fears arise during deeper states of meditation—the fear of being utterly alone; and the fear of knowing and being nothing.

We fear leaving the stream of the known because we equate it with losing one’s mind. When one remains with that fear however, one realizes that one is not losing one’s mind, but gaining Mind.

Given that’s true, a tremendous question arises. If, through random evolution the human brain is potentially a vessel for the numinous (the intrinsic awareness and sacredness that permeates the universe), why is it so rare and difficult to attain that level of awareness?

To my mind, cosmic and terrestrial evolution is essentially a seamless movement, without a ‘Prime Mover,’ beginning with the misnomer of ‘chaos’ to the higher levels of order of galaxies and stars, and from simple to complex biology, where life has the right conditions to take hold and enough stability to develop.

I feel that physics, chemistry and biology follow the same basic principles everywhere in the universe. If so, that means single-celled life is common; multicellular life is rare; and potentially intelligent life like we humans is rare. How much more rare is genuinely intelligent life?

What, you may ask, does all this have to do with the terrible disparities and darkness of this world, not to mention the pressing challenges and day-to-day struggle to survive?

Perhaps nothing. Perhaps everything.

Martin LeFevre

The post Take a Break From Politics first appeared on The Costa Rican Times.

Filling the Metaphysical Vacuum

The mass madness of QAnon has spread beyond America, the factory of reams of memes for a globalized culture. Neo-Nazi Germans believe Donald Trump will invade and save them from Angela Merkel. It would be hilarious if it weren’t so terrifying.

On the more benign side, “Twitter, Facebook and other social networks have been flooded with QAnon-related false information about Covid-19, the Black Lives Matter protests and the 2020 election.”

On the bizarre, beelzebub side, the “Q” crazies believe “the world is run by a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles who are plotting against Mr. Trump while operating a global child sex-trafficking ring.”

As has been reported, “QAnon followers believe that this clique includes top Democrats including Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and George Soros, as well as a number of entertainers and Hollywood celebrities like Oprah Winfrey, Tom Hanks, Ellen DeGeneres and religious figures including Pope Francis and the Dalai Lama.” Tell me it ain’t so Dalai Lama!

It gets worse: “Many of them also believe that, in addition to molesting children, members of this group kill and eat their victims in order to extract a life-extending chemical from their blood.”

QAnon has thus become a black hole of the Western mind, sucking in every piece of crap that comes anywhere near it and spewing quasar-like jets of shit out both ends.

“In Britain, QAnon-themed protests under the banner of ‘Save Our Children’ have taken place in more than 20 cities and towns, attracting a more female and less right-wing demographic.”

In Germany, Patrick Sensburg, a lawmaker in Ms. Merkel’s conservative party and member of the intelligence oversight committee, said, “I was astonished that QAnon is gaining such momentum here. It seemed like such an American thing. But it’s falling on fertile ground.”

What is going on here and there? Not at the political level, which frightens the bejesus out of the old media, but at the philosophical and metaphysical level that QAnon represents for the West.

At this point, the Q virus does not appear to have infected Asians. Besides Germany and Britain however, large stampedes of QAnon herds can be heard in Australia, Canada, France, Italy, New Zealand and Brazil.

What’s the endgame? QAnon promises salvation from tyranny at the end of a struggle dubbed “The Storm,” when President Trump will save the world from the evil global network of the aforementioned blood-sucking pedophiles. If it’s true that the one thing the devil cannot stand is laughter, then let’s laugh until it hurts, or stops hurting. 

Q followers come from every walk of life, and cannot be written off as some marginal social media craze. As many have noted, Q “has jumped from the virtual world into the real world.”

Then again, the virtual world and the real world had become a distinction without a difference years before QAnon exploded onto to the scene in 2017.

“World War Z,” starring Brad Pitt fighting a planet overrun by zombies infected with a lot more difficulty than Covid-19, was a prophetic allegory for the QAnon movement.

Take inwardly dead people anywhere in the imploded West that have lost the capacity to empathize and retain only the worst impulses of human nature (especially herd mentality); continually project hate and prime the pump of fear, and ipso facto, you get QAnon.

On the other side of the world, the herd mentality of Communist China, and to an even greater degree North Korea, have contained the Covid virus and immunized against the Q virus. After all, why do a people need to become Borg if they are already Borg?

It’s often said that civilization is a thin veneer. That does not mean however, that humans are inherently animalistic underneath the surface, as conservatives believe. It simply means that what we call human nature remains a mystery to us because we remain a mystery to ourselves.

The antidote to QAnon is what “Q” actually stands for: Questioning with the honest intent to understand, not make oneself feel comfortably part of some group.

The ancient Greek aphorism inscribed on the Temple of Apollo, “Nosce te ipsum” (Know thyself) remains as true today as it was then. It seems even more unheeded in our age however.

QAnon is filling a vacuum of spiritual, philosophical and metaphysical insight with meaningless garbage, which satisfies the unfelt hunger of ignorant people to make sense of the world.

This mad movement is not going to blow over. It must be blown away by strong winds of insight sweeping the toxic smoke and haze from the Western mind. It’s not too late.

After months, the skies are finally clear and the air is clean in northern California. 

Martin LeFevre

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Costa Rica Hotels Now Allowed to Operate at 50% Capacity

Hotels and cabins throughout Costa Rica are once again allowed to operate, but only at 50% capacity. They are trying out different tactics to attract what little business they can. They offer discounts of up to 50% for the current low season.

One hotel in Puerto Jiménez lowered rates incredibly, from $1,000 a night to $250, for nationals. Nayara Springs reduced its rate from $750 to $450. The hotel Castillo El Arenal lowered its rate from $65 a night to ₡23,000.

Some also add in meals or offer other deals, like pay two nights and stay three. Tour companies are offering 2×1 tours in many locations as well.

Although the rates are significantly reduced, clients or potential customers have taken to social media to complain. They want to see rates of just 25%. Hotel owners ask for understanding. If they lower rates any more they wont stay above water. They wouldn’t be able to cover their costs. Additionally, they’ve been completely out of business for months. Those with fewer than 20 rooms were able to open in May and the rest in June. Still, it is not profitable to open at 50% capacity with more than 50% discounts.

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Surgery Waiting Time in Costa Rica Has Increased Over 100 Days

The waiting time for surgeries in the CCSS has increased significantly, on average, 105 days, due to covid-19. Pandemic related cases have taken priority. While emergency, trauma, and cancer surgeries continue, 36,000 other surgeries have been put on hold. From March to August, 24,288 surgeries were performed. In normal periods, this figure would have been 61,120.

Additionally, 1.6 million appointments with specialists and 70,000 diagnostic tests have been cancelled, between March and August.

In February, before the pandemic, the average wait time for surgery was 393 days. Now it is 498 days. The average wait for an initial appointment with a specialist went from 148 days in February to 166 days in August. The wait for a diagnostic procedure, such as an ultrasound or CT scan, went from 117 days to 136.

1.4 million appointments were handled virtually. Those who must go to the hospital are made to wash their hands before entering, use face masks, and keep distance from others on lines and in waiting rooms.

The CCSS hired 4,023 workers, especially intensive care nurses and respiratory therapists. The CCSS has a fund in place to reschedule surgeries in 2021 that were cancelled in 2020.

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Urgency Is Not a Function of Time

The next few months may well determine the foreseeable future of humanity. There is great urgency, yet most people, on the reasonable left and rationally right, want only a return to so-called normalcy. The comfortable status quo ante not only led inexorably to this global ecological, spiritual and political crisis however; it is gone.

It seems the greater the challenges for humankind, the smaller the responses by individuals. There is a Zen saying that seems to support such smallness: “Make your own little corner of the universe holy.” It’s not quite a koan, though I’m not sure what it means, since it seems to be both true and false at the same time.

On one hand, there’s an irrefutable truth to “make your own corner of the universe holy,” since the only thing over which we have any semblance of control is our own lives. And even there control doesn’t really apply!

As a Baltimore teacher said about her approach to online instruction of elementary school kids during the pandemic: “I know what I do in my space, but I can’t control what anyone else does in theirs.”

The truth in the saying is this: In making our own corner of the universe holy we are making ourselves what we truly are–a microcosm of the universe. There is no separation; instead, there is wholeness.

Nature and the universe, seen as a whole, are holy. That which is undivided is intrinsically holy. Wholeness and holiness have the same etymological root, and point to the same actuality.

The great paradox is that we are creatures of separation, since our “adaptive strategy” as humans is to remove things from the environment and make them ready for use (the root meaning of the word separation).

However division, which is separation carried into the psychological and social dimensions, leads to confusion and darkness, domination and war.

Most people have little relationship to nature, and the globalized Western paradigm, which has brought the Earth and world to the edge of ruin, is to think in terms of extracting ‘resources’ from nature.

As humans, separation and manipulation of ‘things’ is what we do to survive. But fear, need and greed prevent us from seeing when to stop separating from nature, much less cease dividing us from each other.

Not seeing nature and the universe as a whole, nothing is holy. In the prevailing worldview, Christianity superimposes an exception, Jesus Christ, to the rule of the background meaninglessness of life. However that is not what Jesus was about, which is the wholeness of humanity.

Science cannot make us whole, since there is no science without separation and reduction. Some scientists would like to think there is science without separation and reduction, but that’s the scientific mind intruding on the space meant for the religious mind. (Not meant by ‘a God.’ And the religious mind has nothing to do with belief systems). Science has its place, obviously, just not first place in a spiritually rich and balanced life.  

“2016 was an outlier; 2016 was a fluke,” progressives believe. That’s a very dangerous notion, not simply because anything could happen between now and the outcome of the American election and inauguration, but because human consciousness, as we’ve known it for tens of thousands of years, has come to a head in our age.

Therefore the hope that things can return to some nostalgic notion of normalcy and decency is wishful thinking of the highest order.

Kafka quipped, “The messiah will come when you don’t need him anymore.” Does that means when we are a light to ourselves the light of the world will come? That when some no longer need a messiah, the world still will?

I don’t know, but Jesus’ mission clearly failed. After all, what need would there be for a “Second Coming” if it hadn’t?

The only thing I’m sure of, other then complete negation of the ‘me’ and quieting of thought in undirected attention, is that consciousness as we’ve known it since time immemorial is no longer tenable.

There must be radical change, which means individual transmutation sufficient to bring about psychological revolution.

Martin LeFevre

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Putting God On Trial

On the side of the house grows a sprawling vine, spilling over the fence from the neighbor’s unkempt yard. It has many delicate flowers of deep purple. They apparently need very little water. They ask for nothing, yet they give everything to anyone who knows how to look and feel.

I felt today that that purple color must be the most beautiful color on Earth. Taking a short meditation in the meter-wide space between the house and the fence before the flowers close in the hot California sun, I was reminded of the saying: “Color is God.” What does it mean?

A film I watched with a friend last night remains with me today: “God On Trial.” It was Masterpiece movie taken from a play by the same name, and is the story of a formal trial conducted at Auschwitz by a group of Jewish men.

About half of the men had been selected for death in the gas chamber the next day, lending poignancy and urgency to the trial. The question: Was God in breach of his covenant with the Jewish people?

The story was long thought to be apocryphal, but in 2008, eight years before his death, the Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel said, “I was there when God was put on trial.”

“Putting God On Trial” does much more than condemn God for breaking his covenant and abandoning the Jewish people. The characters, as

in the camps, were educated and uneducated men, theists and atheists, men who were angry, accepting or resigned to their fate. It is both a meditation on evil, and on the nature of God.

The play is introduced with the line: “They tried the person they thought most responsible for their catastrophe.”

“What is the charge?” To which a condemned man replies: “Are you blind? Murder. Collaboration.”

Beyond the anthropomorphizing of God, there is a real attempt to understand how any God could let the Holocaust happen. The believers trot out the usual tropes: “We are Jews; we suffer.” “We are being tested.” “It’s because of our sins.”

The arguments become subtler. “Hitler will die, the war will end. God is like a surgeon that has to remove an arm or leg, not as punishment but as purification.”

Some scoff. One answers: “God reserves the right to punish the wicked, but He punishes the good and lets the wicked like Hitler go free.”

A long-time prosecutor brings the arguments back to reality: “We aren’t talking about the mind of God; the charge is breach of covenant.”

However they cannot help but inquire into the mind of God, though some deny that God exists at all. The trial distills down into three compelling scenes.

In the first, a father who tries to save his three sons as they are being taken from him is given a Sophie’s choice: Pick one.

He leaves his listeners in the dark, where we all are, refusing to say what he did. Instead he speaks of the beauty of a spring morning even in Auschwitz, and says, “I don’t know why this is happening, but God is here, I know He is here. I felt God that morning, but the guards could not.” Color is God.

A scholar of Jewish history walks the men through the slaughters by the Jewish people of entire cities that the Torah details. “Now we are being slaughtered,” he says. “Yes,” another replies, “the German guards have ‘God is with us’ on their belt buckles.”

The trial takes a turn. The message is clear: Peoples make God in their own image, and put into his mouth the evils that erupt from their own minds.

A physicist stands and speaks of how many stars are in this galaxy alone: “There are 100,000 million stars in our galaxy, and God’s whole attention is on one planet, and then just with the Jews?” he rhetorically asks.

The prosecutor whispers his secret to the other two judges, telling them, “I was a Jew-hating German. I didn’t know I had a Jewish grandfather until they came for me. They have taken everything from you…don’t let them take your God too, even if he doesn’t exist. Let there be something they can’t take from you.”

That strikes a false note as the play ends. Earlier, someone spoke the truth: “The mistake is to make this personal.” That diagnosis and prescription is dismissed too glibly: “What is a God that isn’t personal? It is weather,” someone says.

Not true. God is not a person, and is not personal. The personal is the source of evil and suffering; understanding things non-personally is the way out.

God is not a being, but being. There is cosmic intelligence and love. Does it care about us? We are people, human beings, potentially at least. God needs us to care.

Martin LeFevre

Link for “God On Trial”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tD7v9phroGM

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Haunted Isle of Man

In 1994, I went on vacation with my ex-wife and my son Jason.  We went to London, England and saw Westminster Abbey, Piccadilly Circus, Tower Bridge over the river Thames, East End of London where the Kray Twins and Jack the Ripper frequented.  Later on this vacation, we took a train to Edinburgh, Scotland and going back to London, the train went through Cardiff, Wales, where I met other “Roberts”.  Yes, I do have a tad bit of Welsh blood in me and according to my family’s legend, we are related to the pirate Bartholomew “Black Bart” Roberts.  While in beautiful England, we did a quick stop over at Stonehenge, saw the Changing of the Guard, toured the inside of Buckingham Palace, visited the town of Bath to see the Roman baths and a quick visit to the Isle of Man.  Special Note:  On another vacation, we visited Ireland’s Dublin Castle & Guinness Beer Factory and a quick stopover at Newry, Northern Ireland.

Yes, we saw a lot and one of the reasons why I took a vacation to England are for two reasons.  One the history.  Yes, there is plenty of history in England.  If you don’t believe me, just take a bus tour through London, the tour bus will stop every 3 minutes to point something out and finally #2 – the paranormal.  Because of all the history in England, you have hauntings everywhere.  You have UFOs.  You have crop circles.  You have the Loch Ness Monster for crying out loud.  England is a smogasbord of paranormal activity that will make any paranormal investigator, cryptozoologist, cerealogist and Ufologist happy as a lark!  When I was in England, I was hoping and praying that I would see a crop circle.  Unfortunately, I did not find a crop circle.

A person could write a zillion books about the United Kingdom, but I am going to focus only one stop over and that is when we visited the Isle of Man.

CASTLE RUSHEN
It was a short visit, so the only place we saw at the Isle of Man was the medieval Castle Rushen.  Castle Rushen is located at the historic capital Castletown.  The castle is used as a museum and education center.  This castle was built in 1200.  It was built for the last Norse King of Man who died in 1266. Robert the Bruce destroyed part of the castle in 1313 during his siege.  Sir William de Montacute in 1344 rebuilt the castle and brought the castle back to it’s former glory.  One of the reasons why I wanted to visit this castle, because I heard about the mysterious Gray Lady.  According to legend, the townsfolk believe she killed her son.  She was arrested for murder.  She was tried and found guilty.  The people of the town hung her.  After she was executed, the townsfolk learned that her son had actually died of natural causes.  Now the ghost of the Gray Lady is seen walking with her ghostly son on the drawbridge.  I heard about the legend of the Gray Lady and was fascinated by the story.  Special Note: Castle Rushen served as a prison and executions took place at this castle.  Other ghosts seen at this castle have the following names: White Lady, Rose, and the Woman in Black. There is also a mysterious underground room in the castle where a male ghost has been seen lingering.  Tourists have named this male spirit Sune, because a United Kingdom ghost hunter claims that he asked the spirit its name and captured a deep male voice saying “Sune”.  So it appears that this male ghost has been identified.

Present day thoughts.  As I think about the Isle of Man, I wish I had stayed there longer, there were many haunted places to explore and only later on in life, did I realize that I missed out on so much that the Isle of Man had to offer.  Let’s take a look at some of the haunted sites on this incredible island.

GAIETY THEATER

A special seat at this theater is said to be haunted.  Seat B14.  The B14 Old Lady haunts this seat.  People have seen an old lady sitting on that seat laughing or crying and acting like she is watching a show.  Legend has it that she lost her husband in the war and she remembers the fun times that she had at this theater with her husband watching shows.  Her favorite seat was of course B14.  Sandra Barr who visited this theater said that she encountered the B14 Old Lady and that the B14 Old Lady got up from her seat, walked towards Sandra, walked through Sandra and went into a wall and vanished.  Sandra was astonished that she for the first time encountered the paranormal. 

PEEL CASTLE
Peel Castle was was built in the 11th century by the Vikings, under the rule of King Magnus Barefoot. The castle was originally built with wood and later local red sandstone was used.  Red sandstone is plentiful on the island.  People claim that they see phantom black dogs at the castle.  The most famous black dog of Peel Castle is Moddey Dhoo. During the 17th century Moddey Dhoo was seen many times over wandering the grounds of Peel Castle.  It was mostly seen on a regular basis.  It would seem to emerge from or disappear into a passageway that connected the guard room to the apartment of the Captain of the Guard.  A guard had a mild stroke after encountering Moddey Dhoo and because of that they sealed up the passageway.  This ended the sightings of Moddey Dhoo. In this passageway unearthly screams were heard and a guard came out of the passageway as white as a ghost.  After the experience, it was said he was lethargic and eventually passed away.  Another black dog that is seen is called Mauthe Doog.  Mauthe Doog is said to come out during a full moon and his silhouette is seen along the hillside.  Recently another strange black dog was seen roaming the grounds and the tourists who were witnesses to this phenomena call the dog “Silvermane”, because he is all black, but has a silver streak going up his snout and over his head.  One tourist claims she heard him howl.

MALEW CHURCHYARD
There are many famous vampires that we know of, such as Dracula, Edward Cullen of the Twilight series, Bill Compton of True Blood, Nosferatu.  Even Lilith and Judas from the Bible have been accused of being vampires in various novels and movies.  But, here is a story of a true life vampire named Matthew Hassall.  Matthew was just an ordinary fellow until the day he died.  Many of his friends and family gathered around at his wake.   At the wake he startled everyone by sitting straight up.  At that point of time he was declared a vampire and could not be buried on hallowed ground with his deceased wife Margaret.  The legend goes that his grave was dug from behind the stone wall that the grave stands against (the old boundary of the church yard) and his body placed inside that way. Just to make sure he didn’t rise again, a stone slab was placed over his corpse and iron stakes and chains cover the grave to keep him in. These chains have remained from the 1800s to this very present day.CASTLETOWN
If you’ve been to Castletown, you have seen the Smelt monument in the town square. On one side is a wooden plaque that states the fate of a local woman who was accused, along with her son, of riding broomsticks around fields to encourage crops to grow. Both were held as prisoners at Castle Rushen and on their last day were dressed in white gowns and taken by cart to Peel where they were put on display as a caution to would-be witches. Afterwards they were taken back to Castletown for execution by fire.  Leslie McKinnon says that she has a actually seen 2 figures on fire riding broomsticks under the light of a full moon in Castletown.  These 2 figures are known as the Castletown Fire Witches.

MILNTOWN
Milntown is a historic house on Lezayre Road, just outside of Ramsey. It has extensive gardens and a restaurant. The main part of the house is said to be where the ghosts sightings have been and it’s reported to be the most haunted house on the Isle of Man! There are two main ghosts that have been reported here, the former lady of the house (known as the Milntown Lady) and the other is a malevolent, aggressive spirit who likes to frighten visitors (known as the Narky Poltergeist). 

GROUDLE GLEN POLAR BEARS
So as you can see, there is so much happening at the Isle of Man.  If you were to get away from the paranormal, you will also find mysteries.  One mystery is the Groudle Glen Polar Bears who were released during WWI.  After their release, they simply vanished, never to be seen again.  The Groudle Glen Polar Bears were very popular and to this day, they are still discussed among family members.

By Paul Dale Roberts, HPI’s Esoteric Detective
Halo Paranormal Investigations
www.cryptic916.com/
Sacramento Paranormal Help
www.facebook.com/HaloParanormalInvestigations/

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