Eye of God

This photo, dubbed the "Eye of God," has been circling the web, and recently found its way into my inbox.

The photo is from the NASA website and depicts the Helix Nebula. According to Snopes the nebula is not that colorful in real life. The photo is actually a composit of 9 different photographs of the nebula. Here's another photo of the same nebula, also from the NASA website.

This is NASA's description of what is occurring:

One day our Sun may look like this. The Helix Nebula is the closest example of a planetary nebula created at the end of the life of a Sun-like star. The outer gasses of the star expelled into space appear from our vantage point as if we are looking down a helix. The remnant central stellar core, destined to become a white dwarf star, glows in light so energetic it causes the previously expelled gas to fluoresce. The Helix Nebula, given a technical designation of NGC 7293, lies 450 light-years away towards the constellation of Aquarius and spans 1.5 light-years. The above image was taken with the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT) located atop a dormant volcano in Hawaii, USA. A close-up of the inner edge of the Helix Nebula shows unusual gas knots of unknown origin.

So the real explanation may not be as "feel-good" as the urban legend floating around the web. Sorry, no matter what you've read, sending the photo to seven people on your email list won't bring you luck. But if you're willing to contemplate the wonder of a planetary star in entropy, it's truly magnificent.

I was struck by this image for another reason. It is an example of replicated geometries. It is not accidental that certain cardinal shapes recur throughout our reflective reality. "Sacred geometry," which pertains to the architecture of matter, ascribes significance to certain forms. This is why we see them in so many sacred symbols. The shapes themselves demonstrate the geometric requirements of manifest form.

The eye shape is sacred to many cultures. The variously attributed "Eye of Ra" or "Eye of Horus" in ancient Egypt is one example.

Legends and images of eyes permeate both mythology and superstition and with all manner of magical attributions. The evil eye is common to the folklore which has been disseminated outward from Mediterranean cultures. I've known many Greek and Italian Americans who wore a single disembodied eye in jewelry and on key chains; protection from the evil eye.

Every US dollar bears the "Eye of Providence." In the orignal sketches for the Great Seal, it was a single disembodied eye floating over a truncated pyramid, surrounded by a "glory." In its final form it was encapsulated in a triangle, reminiscent of the Egyptian benben; an icon of manifestation.

The "eye," then, captures our imagination in a way that few forms do. The geometry of the eye, with its alternations of spherical and vesica pisces shapes, tells the story of manifest creation. In sacred geometry the sphere represents the unity from which all manifestation springs. The vesica pisces, or almond shape, occurs when spheres overlap sheres. It is the shape of cell division, when one becomes two. That duality and oppostion makes possible the wave form out of which all things generate. Robert Lawlor explains in his book Sacred Geometry: Philosophy and practice.

The idea of the unknowable Unity at the beginning has been the basis of many philosphies and mythological systems. While Shakhara, with the Buddhism of a certain period, posited the void as a fundamental assumption, the main stream of Hinduism has always rested on the notion of the One, the Divine, who divided himself within himself to form his own self-created opposite, the manifested universe. Within the divine self-regard, three qualities of himself became distininguished: Sat (immobile being), Chit (consciousness-force) and Ananda (bliss). The original unity, represented by a circle, is then restated in the concept of the Real-Idea, the thought of God, which the Hindus called the bindu or seed, what we call the geometrical point. The point, according to the Shiva Sutra Vimarshini Commentaries, forms the limit between the manifest and non-manifest, between the spatial and the non-spatial. The bindu corresponds to the 'seed-sound idea' of the Tantras. The Divine transforms himself into sound vibration (nada), and proliferates the universe, which is not different from himself, by giving form or verbal expression to this self-idea. Ramakrishna summarized the scripture by saying, 'the Universe is nothing but the Divine uttering his own name to himself.'

Thus the universe springs forth from the Word. This transcendent Word is only a vibration (a materialization) of the Divine thought which gives rise to the fractioning of unity which is creation. The Word (saabda in Sanskrit, the logos of the Christians and Gnostics), whose nature is pure vibration, represents the essential nature of all that exists. Concentric vibrational waves span outward from innumerable centres and their overlappings (interference patterns) form nodules of trapped energy which become the whirling, fiery bodies of the heavens. The Real-Idea, the Purusha, the inaudible and invisible point of the sound-idea remains fixed and immutable. Its names, however, can be investigated through geometry and number. This emitted sound, the naming of God's idea, is what the Pythagoreans would call the Music of the Spheres.

Seeing the Eye of God, then, is not a once in a lifetime opportunity, seen through a telescope. We see the Eye of God everytime we look into the eyes of another, or into our own eyes in a mirror. For "God is an infinite sphere whose circumference is everywhere and whose center is nowhere."

"Sudden Climate Change" cont.

Antarctic ice sheets are melting faster than thought; as much as 26 miles of ice per year. From the Washington Post.

The new findings, which are being published today in the journal Science, suggest that global sea level could rise substantially over the next several centuries.

It is one of a slew of scientific papers in recent weeks that have sought to gauge the impact of climate change on the world's oceans and lakes. Just last month two researchers reported that Greenland's glaciers are melting into the sea twice as fast as previously believed, and a separate paper in Science today predicts that by the end of this century lakes and streams on one-fourth of the African continent could be drying up because of higher temperatures.

The new Antarctic measurements, using data from two NASA satellites called the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE), found that the amount of water pouring annually from the ice sheet into the ocean -- equivalent to the amount of water the United States uses in three months -- is causing global sea level to rise by 0.4 millimeters a year. The continent holds 90 percent of the world's ice, and the disappearance of even its smaller West Antarctic ice sheet could raise worldwide sea levels by an estimated 20 feet.

Let's Talk "Sudden Climate Change"

It was a balmy, spring day in January when I bumped into my neighbor outside. "Lovely weather," he remarked.

"Lovely. But a little creepy when you consider it comes courtesy of global warming."

"Global warming? Maybe hundreds of years from now." He made a hasty break for his SUV.

Here in the United States, where the reality of global climate change is still being debated, such denial is common. However, as I tried to explain to my rapidly retreating neighbor, we are seeing the results of global warming right now, all over the world, and there is the very real threat that those results will escalate dramatically in a very few years. There are whisperings of something called "sudden climate change." New research is showing that we are ahead of many of the timetable predictions. Worse, at a certain point the changes in our climate become cumulative. As John Atcheson explains in "Hotter, Faster, Worser," there are developing "feedback loops" in which the increasing warmth of the planet is giving birth to sudden outpourings of carbon dioxide and methane, which accelorate the warming, which increases the release of carbon dioxide and methane... Well, you can see where this is going.

...the scientific community failed to adequately anticipate and model several positive feedback loops that profoundly amplify the rate and extent of human-induced climate change. And in the case of global warming, positive feedback loops can have some very negative consequences. The plain fact is, we are fast approaching – and perhaps well past – several tipping points which would make global warming irreversible.

In an editorial in the Baltimore Sun on December 15th, 2004 this author outlined one such tipping point: a self-reinforcing feedback loop in which higher temperatures caused methane – a powerful heat-trapping greenhouse gas (GHG) – to escape from ice-like structures called clathrates, which raised the temperature which caused more methane to be released and so on. Even though there was strong evidence that this mechanism had contributed to at least two extreme warming events in the geologic past, the scientific community hadn’t yet focused on methane ices in 2004. Even among the few pessimists who had, we believed – or hoped – that we had a decade or so before anything like it began happening again.

We were wrong.

In August of 2005 a team of scientists from Oxford and Tomsk University in Russia announced that a massive Siberian peat bog the size of Germany and France combined was melting, releasing billions of tons of methane as it did.

The last time it got warm enough to set off this feedback loop was 55 million years ago in a period known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum or PETM, when increased volcanic activity released enough GHGs to trigger a series of self-reinforcing methane burps. The resulting warming caused massive die-offs and it took more than a 100,000 years for the earth to recover.

It’s looks like we’re on the verge of triggering a far worse event....

While I've been concerned about the environment for many years, there was a tipping point in my own consciousness in 2003 when I read reports of vast numbers of French citizens dropping dead from a heat wave. Atcheson puts the final tally of European heat related deaths that summer at 35,000. But aside from the alarming freakishness of this event, there were more far-reaching consequences. As Atcheson explains:

There are other positive feedback loops we’ve failed to anticipate. For example, the heat wave in Europe that killed 35,000 people in 2003 also damaged European woodlands, causing them to release more carbon dioxide, the main GHG, than they sequester – exactly the opposite of the assumptions built into our models, which treat forests as sponges that sop up excess carbon.

This is the type of occurence that could lead to sudden climate change. And Atcheson explains that there are similar concerns about other regions.

The same thing is happening to a number of other ecosystems that our models and scientists have treated as carbon sinks. The Amazon rainforest, the boreal forests (one of the largest terrestrial carbon sinks in the planet), and soils in temperate areas are all releasing more carbon than they are absorbing, due to global warming-induced droughts, diseases, pest activity, and metabolic changes. In short, many of the things we treat as carbon sponges in our models aren’t sopping up excess carbon; they’re being wrung out and releasing extra carbon.

The polar ice cap is also melting far faster than models predict, setting off another feedback loop. Less ice means more open water, which absorbs more heat which means less ice, and so on.

Even worse, we’ve substantially underestimated the rate at which continental glaciers are melting.

Climate change models predicted that it would take more than 1,000 years for Greenland’s ice sheet to melt. But at the AAAS meeting in St. Louis, NASA’s Eric Rignot outlined the results of a study that shows Greenland’s ice cover is breaking apart and flowing into the sea at rates far in excess of anything scientists predicted, and it’s accelerating each year. If (or when) Greenland’s ice cover melts, it will raise sea levels by 21 feet – enough to inundate nearly every sea port in America.

All of this paints a picture far worse than people like my neighbor are taking in. The impact of global warming is not in the indefinite future. It's now. As a recent Washington Post article explains, increasing global temperatures are estimated to claim 150,000 lives and cause roughly 5 million illnesses a year. Most of the victims of the rising occurences of malaria, malnutrition, and diarrhea are the world's poor, whose lack of political clout has made their deaths largely invisible to suburban America.

But the "oceans will not protect us" from the impact of sudden climate change and it could occur within 20 years. A report ordered by the Pentagon, and quietly buried without fanfare, posited that the effects of climate shift could plunge us into a world war.

Climate change over the next 20 years could result in a global catastrophe costing millions of lives in wars and natural disasters..

A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a 'Siberian' climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world.

The document predicts that abrupt climate change could bring the planet to the edge of anarchy as countries develop a nuclear threat to defend and secure dwindling food, water and energy supplies. The threat to global stability vastly eclipses that of terrorism, say the few experts privy to its contents.

'Disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life,' concludes the Pentagon analysis. 'Once again, warfare would define human life.'

The theorist behind this alarming prediction is the respected military advisor Andrew Marshall; known in National Defense circles as "Yoda." He was appointed by Donald Rumsfeld in pre-9/11 2001 to bring his considerable influence to bear on the reshaping of the American military. But the report Marshall delivered in early 2004 concluded that the threat of an environmental catastrophe is far greater than that of global terrorism.

Worse, we may have already passed the point of no return. Says Atcheson:

A little over a year ago at the conclusion of a global conference in Exeter England on Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change, scientists warned that if we allowed atmospheric concentrations of GHG to exceed 400 ppm, we could trigger serious and irreversible consequences. We passed that milestone in 2005 with little notice and no fanfare.

The scientific uncertainty in global warming isn’t about whether it’s occurring or whether it’s caused by human activity, or even if it will "cost" us too much to deal with it now. That’s all been settled. Scientists are now debating whether it’s too late to prevent planetary devastation, or whether we have yet a small window to forestall the worst effects of global warming.

Christian Mob Kills Muslims

You have heard that it was said,
"An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth."
But I say to you, do not resist him who is evil;
but whoever slaps you on your right cheek,
turn him the other also.
MATTHEW 5:38-9

To members of the Nigerian Igbo tribe, I have to ask, how's that "turn the other cheek" thing workin' out for you?

AN enraged mob of Nigerian Christian youths has slaughtered dozens of Muslims in two days of rioting in the southern city of Onitsha.

Rioting broke out in the lawless trading town on the banks of the Niger River yesterday when members of the Igbo tribe launched revenge attacks in response to an earlier massacre of Christians in the north of the country.

Nineteen corpses were seen scattered by the side of the main road into the city across the Niger River bridge, where a contingent of soldiers had set up a roadblock to hold back hundreds of rioters armed with clubs and machetes.

The bodies had been beaten, slashed and in some cases burnt. Around the bloodied corpses lay scattered the caps and Islamic prayer beads associated with the northern Hausa tribe.

It gets better.

"Some of them had been beheaded, others had had their genitals removed. I saw one boy holding a severed head with blood dripping from it," he said.

I don't mean to be flip, but it does give the lie to that whole "religion of peace" idea. I know what you're saying. This is a skirmish among Nigerian tribesmen; an atrocity committed by people whose Christian conversion just hasn't permeated their more ancient tribal differences. I don't know enough about the history of these tribes to say what other cultural factors are at play. I do know enough about the Christian Bible to say that it does not instill the values of peace and forgiveness.

But if there is any further injury,
they you shall appoint as a penalty
life for life,eye for eye, tooth for tooth,
hand for hand, foot for foot,burn for burn,
wound for wound, bruise for bruise.
EXODUS 21: 23-5

And if a man injures his neighbor,
just as he has done so it shall be done to him:
fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth;
just as he has injured man, so it shall be inflicted on him.
LEVITICUS 24:19-20

Thus you shall not show pity: life for life, eye for eye,
tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot.
DEUTERONOMY 19:21

So, one could argue that our Igbo brothers were simply following a different Biblical directive. Christianity is anchored in a time of tribal warfare and an ethic that is by most modern standards, barbaric. To quote Joseph Campbell:

[The Bible is] the most over-advertised book in the world. It's very pretentious to claim it to be the word of God, or accept it as such and perpetuate this tribal mythology, justifying all kinds of violence to people who are not members of the tribe.

The thing I see about the Bible that's unfortunate is that it's a tribally circumscribed mythology. It deals with a certain people at a certain time. The Christians magnified it to include them. It then turns this society against all others, whereas the condition of the world today is that this particular society that's presented in the Bible isn't even the most important. This thing is like a dead weight. It's pulling us back because it belongs to an earlier period. We can't break loose and move into a modern theology.

One of the great promises of mythology is, with what social group do you identify? How about the planet? To say that the members of this particular social group are the elite of God's world is a good way to keep that group together, but look at the consequences! I think that what might be called the sanctified chauvinism of the Bible is one of the curses of the planet today.

There Is Only One World

There is only one world, the world that is pressing up against you this minute.
-- Storm Jameson

And it's feeling a little close right now, isn't it? Everyone I've spoken to over the last week has been feeling like they're in a pressure cooker. I know I am. A friend of mine gave me a book for Christmas called "365 Nirvana: Here and Now." Periodically I just flip the book open and see where I land. The quote above was the first thing I saw the other day when I tried this bit of bibliomancy. It was not a comfort.

My colleague and shamanic healer Christina Pratt talks about "clear mirrors" and "smoky mirrors." Clear mirrors are pleasant reflections. When we encounter people and events that feel pleasing to us, they are reflecting the best in us. But other reflections are not so attractive -- even repellent. Those are smoky mirrors; reflections of our shadow self.

I'm not an astrologer but I've been told that we are moving through some difficult transits right now. There is certainly a sense of shared tension; the Muslim world is rioting over offensive cartoons, Vice President Cheney shot a man in a hunting accident... It would be nice to think that those things are "over there." They're not. They're part of our collective consciousness. Whether we like it or not, some tiny piece of these events around the globe is in each one of us, and is undoubtedly mirrored in some way in our daily lives. We would do well to heed those reminders of what we need to clear in our consciousness. As the next quote in my book reminds me:

Everything comes to you in life as a teacher.
Pay attention.
Learn quickly.
-- Old Cherokee Woman to Her Grandson

Modern Day Witch Trials

On May 6, 1993, the mutilated bodies of three 8-year-old boys were found in the wilds of West Memphis, Arkansas. Michael Moore, Stevie Branch, and Christopher Byers were found naked, bound hand to foot, with their own shoe laces. They had been badly beaten and sustained multiple skull fractures. Moore and Branch had drowned in the creek. Byers, repeatedly stabbed and castrated, had bled to death. The shocked and grief stricken West Memphis townspeople, challenged to explain such an atrocity, came to the only logical conclusion. The children had been violently sacrificed in a dark, Satanic rite.

Rapidly, West Memphis law enforcement singled out local teen, Damien Echols. The cerebral, brooding youth, inclined to dressing all in black, listening to Metallica, and studying Wicca, seemed bizarre and diabolical enough to have carried out the grisley crime. Unable to connect any physical evidence, the police relied on interviews with possible witnesses. In a twelve hour interview, a mildly retarded 17 year old named Jessie Misskelley corroborated police suspicions regarding Damien Echols. He, further, managed to implicate Damien's friend Jason Baldwin and himself. The three teen misfits were now set to stand trial for a gruesome act of Satanic ritual murder -- an act of dark witchery right out of the worst nightmares of the sleepy Arkansas town.

PARADISE LOST:
The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hill
by Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky

Filmmakers Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky, intrigued by news accounts of the crime and pending trials, headed for West Memphis. There, they would capture on film a startling portrait of a town in turmoil. The Emmy-winning documentary records both the court proceedings and the back-story in the form of interviews with all the major players: the families of both the victims and the accused, lawyers, law enforcement, even, the three plaintiffs. As recorded by Berlinger and Sinofsky, the prosecution's case is largely circumstantial. Clumsy police work had damaged what physical evidence there was on the river bed. Much rests on Jessie Misskelley's confession, although it had been debunked by Dr. Richard Ofshe, a Pulitzer Prize winning expert on false confessions. Only a small part of Ofshe's testimony was heard during Misskelley's trial.

Paradise Lost is a brilliant piece of journalism -- objective, and unflinching. Finding its largest audience on HBO, the film started a surprising snowball effect. Many viewers were shocked and horrified by the result of the trials. All three boys were convicted of capital murder. Damien Echols was sent to death row, where he remains to this day. As a result of the documentary, many came to the conclusion that this had been a modern day "witch hunt," the disturbing result of irrational "satanic panic." A movement was born to rectify an injustice and "Free the West Memphis Three."

PARADISE LOST II: Revelations
by Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky

Berlinger and Sinofsky return to West Memphis, Arkansas, to observe the ongoing social and legal hurdles of Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley. Although Paradise Lost II: Revelations largely follows the ongoing work of a group of advocates for the convicted killers, it is John Mark Byers, step-father of the most brutally murdered boy, who emerges as the star. The only family member of a victim to return in the sequel -- his wife died under mysterious circumstances -- Byers embarks on a love affair with the camera. He relives the glory of his gospel singing days. He dramatically enacts a version of the murder on the river bank. He shares the intimate memory of his own violent abuse as a child. He tells contradicting versions of the events leading up the loss of all his teeth. (Bite mark evidence emerges as important data overlooked in the original trials.) He takes and passes a lie detector test and triumphantly proclaims, "I knew I was innocent!" The hard drinking, heavily medicated, brain-tumor suffering Byers is a compelling figure. Not surprisingly, he has emerged as the likely perpetrator in an alternate theory of the crime.

DEVIL'S KNOT:
The True Story of the West Memphis Three
by Mara Leveritt

A writer and contributing editor at the Weekly Arkansas Journal, Mara Leveritt took an early interest in the shocking child murder. Unsatisfied by the circumstantial evidence presented in the jury trials that convicted Echols, Baldwin and Misskelley, Leveritt began piecing together court documents. Using the gift of time to do what the inexperienced and pressured defense attorneys could not do, she cut and pasted events and pieced together a timeline. Emerging under her microscope are details missing from the trial accounts. She discovers that the brother and the stepfather of Chris Byers gave contradictory accounts of the search for the missing boy. Her research throws into question John Mark Byers's alibi. She learns that police never investigated reports of a disheveled man who left blood stains in a fast food restaraunt the night the boys disappeared. Leveritt concludes that the case is a "constitutional nightmare," violating separation of church and state, and arriving at a prosecution with no tangible proof.

RISE ABOVE: 24 Black Flag Songs to Benefit the West Memphis Three
By Henry Rollins, et al.

The case of Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jessie Misskelley has emerged, in recent years, as a popular cause celebre. "Free the West Memphis Three" t-shirts adorn celebrities in the strangest places and clearly visable on camera. In Rise Above, rocker and actor, Henry Rollins assembles an all-star line-up and recreates 24 songs from his legendary band "Black Flag." Featuring the diverse talents of Iggy Pop, Exene Cervenka, Dean Ween, Corey Taylor, Tom Araya, Hank Williams III, Ice T and many more, the driving, high energy recording is a fitting testimony to the moral outrage of three young men spending their youth and, possibly, their lives in prison for murders they most surely did not commit.

The Power of Negative Thinking?

A recent article, in the paper of record, posits the latest challenge to the widely held belief in the "power of positive thinking." Survey findings from the European Society of Medical Oncology cast serious doubt on the effectiveness of cancer support groups in extending life. Further, the article, cites experts on the dark side of being cheery. Psychologist Barbara S. Held calls for an end to the "tyranny of a positive attitude in America."

The surfacing of fresh debate on beliefs that have long been a staple of "new age" thought, reminds me of discussions my friends and I were having in the early 90s. Having read all the books on overcoming negativity, healing through positive thought, and saying affirmations, a lot of us were pretty sure that we had the answers to, well, everything. At the time, I had a good friend who suffered from clinical depression. Try as she might, she was perpetually gloomy. "What is the difference," she asked, "between all this positive thinking and denial?" Good question.

In the ensuing years, I suffered some personal setbacks. A painful romantic split, the death of my best friend Raymond... these were things that did not lend themselves easily to the remedial effects of "positive affirmations." Of all the losses I had experienced in my life, these, with their heavy implications of unresolved past life issues and apparent injustice, were debilitating on a level I had never really experienced. The chipper assurances of many of my friends at healing groups and psychic fairs, sounded hollow and unsatisfying. I began to resent those who admonished me to "cancel, cancel" negative statements as intrusive "thought police."

I did not have a name for it then, but, I had begun a journey known as the "dark night of the soul." The phrase derives from the writings of 16th century Carmelite monk, St. John of the Cross. It speaks to a richer expression of spiritual growth that honors this experience as a sacred passage of transformation. In time I found resources that explained the terrain I was traveling. I laid aside my Louise Hay books and embraced, instead, the notions of Carl Jung who said, "One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The latter procedure, however is disagreeable, and therefore not popular."

The journey towards integrity, the state of being integral, isn't an entirely comfortable one, either for individuals or for society at large. Thinking only happy thoughts won't get us there. It is time to simply tell the truth.

The Outrage of Dr. Laura

It should come as no surprise that there is a war between radio personality Dr. Laura and the gay community, or "biological errors." Every day brings another outrage from this self-appointed moral guardian and an equal and opposite reaction from a stunned public. The ins and outs of these skirmishes can be found at StopDrLaura.com

It is a source of horrified fascination for me that homosexuality is such a rallying point for religious conservatives (be they Christian or, as in this unusual for-instance, Jewish) when the subject gets so little ink in the very text on which they base their lives. The only place in the Bible where homosexuality is referred to directly is in the old testament book of Leviticus, where it is referred to as an abomination. Sounds like strong stuff until you consider that a strict translation of the original text means "ritually unclean," much like eating pork. (Has Dr. Laura weighed in on the other white meat? If so, the National Pork Board has shown remarkable restraint.)

There are exactly two verses in Leviticus that address male/male love and nothing at all about lesbianism. Slavery, however, is absolutely fine in this text. It is a lesser sin, for example, to screw your neighbor's slave than his wife or daughter.

Leviticus does have its value. It explains food preparation in a time before refrigeration. It explains how to recognize and prevent the spread of infectious diseases like leprosy. It also has an inordinate amount of information on animal sacrifice. I don't know if Dr. Laura sacrifices lambs and goats, but she did recently call for the ritual sacrifice of a 14 year old girl. This because the child had the temerity to write an award winning essay on the first amendment and the internet. No really! I'm not making this up. Details can be found here. The evident irony of an embattled radio personality speaking out against freedom of speech is a subject for another discussion.

Views on homosexuality have run the gamut throughout history and have always been about cultural context, not divine revelation. Gay bashers who stand on Judeo-Christian scripture do so with very little foundation and invariable hypocrisy.

Addendum: I'd like to reprint the text of legendary "Letter to Dr. Laura," because it makes the case better than anything I have to say on this issue. This letter circulated heavily in email at the height of Dr. Laura's popularity. Details can be found here.

Dear Dr. Laura,

Thank you for doing so much to educate people regarding God's Law. I have learned a great deal from your show, and I try to share that knowledge with as many people as I can. When someone tries to defend the homosexual lifestyle, for example, I simply remind him that Leviticus 18:22 clearly states it to be an abomination. End of debate.

I do need some advice from you, however, regarding some of the specific laws and how to best follow them.

a) When I burn a bull on the altar as a sacrifice, I know it creates a pleasing odor for the Lord (Lev 1:9). The problem is my neighbors. They claim the odor is not pleasing to them. Should I smite them?

b) I would like to sell my daughter into slavery, as sanctioned in Exodus 21:7. In this day and age, what do you think would be a fair price for her?

c) I know that I am allowed no contact with a woman while she is in her period of menstrual uncleanliness (Lev 15:19-24). The problem is, how do I tell? I have tried asking, but most women take offense.

d) Lev. 25:44 states that I may indeed possess slaves, both male and female, provided they are purchased from neighboring nations. A friend of mine claims that this applies to Mexicans, but not Canadians. Can you clarify? Why can't I own Canadians?

e) I have a neighbor who insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus 35:2 clearly states he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to kill him myself?

f) A friend of mine feels that even though eating shellfish is an Abomination (Lev 11:10), it is a lesser abomination than homosexuality. I don't agree. Can you settle this?

g) Lev 21:20 states that I may not approach the altar of God if I have a defect in my sight. I have to admit that I wear reading glasses. Does my vision have to be 20/20, or is there some wiggle room here?

h) Most of my male friends get their hair trimmed, including the hair around their temples, even though this is expressly forbidden by Lev 19:27. How should they die?

i) I know from Lev 11:6-8 that touching the skin of a dead pig makes me unclean, but may I still play football if I wear gloves?

j) My uncle has a farm. He violates Lev 19:19 by planting two different crops in the same field, as does his wife by wearing garments made of two different kinds of thread (cotton/polyester blend). He also tends to curse and blaspheme a lot. Is it really necessary that we go to all the trouble of getting the whole town together to stone them? (Lev 24:10-16) Couldn't we just burn them to death at a private family affair like we do with people who sleep with their in-laws? (Lev. 20:14)

I know you have studied these things extensively, so I am confident you can help.

Thank you again for reminding us that God's word is eternal and unchanging.

Your devoted disciple and adoring fan.

Papal Sin

• Between 1983 and 1987 reports of Catholic priests sexually abusing children were calculated at a rate of one per week. No diocese in the United States has been without a pedophilia case.
• Other casualties of the misdirected sexuality of Catholic priests are great numbers of women who "tempted" the priests only to be disgarded and in many cases pressured into terminating the resulting pregnancies.
• The Vatican's stance on birth control is so unrelenting it will not even permit the use of condoms by married heterosexual couples in which one partner has AIDS.

Gary Wills portrait of the contemporary Catholic church conveys a top heavy institution whose leaders are embarassingly out of touch with the modern world and their own laity. They remain smug in their self-righteousness and continue to uphold a system rife with corruption and hypocricy. For this Wills does not blame the Catholic faith or the entirety of the church, of which he is a part.

At first glance Papal Sin may look like the angry polemic of a disgruntled lapsed Catholic, but it proves to be something completely different. It is Wills's love for the Catholic church, its core beliefs and rich history, that inspire his plea to the Vatican to admit its own errors, both present and historical, and respond to the majority of its members changing world views.

He takes the church authority to task on its torture of scripture and convoluted theories on "natural law" to justify its positions on birth control, abortion, celibate priesthood, refusal to ordain women, and homosexuality. These and other issues, he contends have increased the divide between the Vatican and lay Catholics, radically reduced the number of ordained priests, and led to inevitable hypocricy on the part of clergy all the way to the top.

His logic is sometimes muddled, as when he attempts to demonstrate the failure of the recently released papal document We Remember to adequately address the Holocaust. He opens this section by stating:

The debilitating effect of intellectual dishonesty can be touching. Even when papal authority sincerely wants to perform a virtuous act, when it spends years screwing up the nerve to do it, when it actually thinks it has done it, when it releases notice of having done it, when it expects to be congratulated on doing it -- it has not done it. Not because it did not want to do it, or did not believe it did it. It was simply unable to do it, because that would have involved coming clean about the record of the papal institution. And that is all but unthinkable.

Granted, it would be a vast undertaking to demonstrate just how cowardly a document this was, but Wills loses his best points by dwelling on some of the smallest and most ill-defined. In We Rembember the Vatican equivocates that it could not be held responsible for any Nazi complicity because such Catholic sympathizers were not part of the church hierarchy and were acting outside its authority. Wills argues that "all" Catholics are the church, not just the magisterium. This would seem to me to be an entirely separate argument. The more germaine point would be the blatant falseness of that position. Not only were there highly placed church dignitaries, such as Archbishop Cesare Orsenigo, who were Nazi sympathizers but it could easily be argued that it is the church's long history of documentable, institutionalized anti-semitism that led many Catholics among both clergy and laity to varying degrees of Nazi complicity. When the author does get around to making such points, the facts speak for themselves and they are disturbing.

A chapter on Mary worship is fascinating if only for what it does not say. Wills goes to great lengths to demonstrate how off the mark the deification of the Virgin is from a Biblical perspective. All true. Mary was not, in fact, a major player in the early church, and yet, she has since become the voice of compassion and a figure equal to Christ in modern Catholicism. Here Wills is missing the broader context responsible for this actuality. The Virgin Mary is one of the most noticable vestiges of the Pagan cultures overtaken by the expansion of Christendom. She is what is left of the Mother Goddess and one of the most likable aspects of modern-day Catholicism.

For all its tangential logic and emotional reactiveness Papal Sin is a compelling read. Wills shakes all the skeletons out of the papal closet and fixes an unflinching eye on its moral transgressions. He is a knowledgable historian and an aggressive reporter, but his devotion to Christian principals make this book more a call conscience than an attack on an anachronistic institution. It would seem his only agenda is to see his church saved from its own self-destruction.

Lining Up the Bones

Some years ago, I experienced a bodywork paradigm that changed the shape of my physical body and created an environment for deep shift in every other area of my life. The bodywork was the Sandlin Technique and its sole practitioner at that time was Virginia Sandlin. Virginia, a seventh generation Cherokee Mystic, was taught these techniques by her grandmother who was also a Mystic. I went on to became one of the first people outside of this lineage to be taught the Sandlin technique.

This bodywork was traditionally done to prepare people for long vision quests. It is the physical component to a philosophy of wholeness that is the gateway to a greater spiritual reality. When the body is in an organic state of alignment, the foundation is laid for expansion in every other area of our beingness.

It was frustration with my lung capacity that brought me to Virginia Sandlin. I'd heard from clients of hers that the first thing she'd done was lower and expand their rib cages. In my first session with Virginia, she took me through a painless process that I couldn't imagine would change the position of my ribs. About thirty minutes after she began, my rib cage was nearly two inches lower and an entirely different shape. I was amazed and my amazement grew throughout the day and evening as I experienced very different posture and physical control.

The next morning, I awoke to confusion at my sudden lack of lower back pain and stiffness. Over the next several days, I enjoyed many new sensations as I felt muscles moving and firming in my thighs that I had never even known were there.

After three sessions with Virginia, my ribs were about two and a half inches lower and a spinal misalignment, that I hadn't known was the source of my discomfort, was corrected. I think that, from a very young age, I had mimicked my mother's asthmatic breathing. Apparently, this caused my ribs to form incorrectly around the contracted breathing pattern. Because they were so high, my spine was pulled out of alignment and my sacrum had become very overextended. Hence, I'd had chronic lower back pain and no muscle tone from my waist to my knees.

Having these things corrected seemed like nothing short of a miracle to me. It was, in fact, the fulfillment of a vision I'd had in meditation two years earlier but did not understand. In this vision one of my guides was lining up bones on a wool blanket. The image had never left me. When I discovered Virginia Sandlin's bodywork, I discovered that my guide was being very literal. She was trying to tell me that my bones needed lining up.

The skeletal system is the foundation of the physical body. The first phase of the Sandlin Technique, the "postpartum session," addresses the skeletal shifts that occur in pregnancy and expedites postpartum recovery. In her years of working on the bodies of both men and women, Virginia learned that this skeletal adjustment is of tremendous help to many people because their own birth trauma left them with a misshapen skeleton.

The corrections the body takes in this bodywork are rapid, painless, and permanent. This is because the Sandlin Technique goes to the original cause and reframes the cellular memory for health.

It thrills me to be able to incorporate a bodywork, that once mystified me, into my practice. I have been more than gratified by the transformation I have witnessed in clients who have embraced this technique. Not only have I seen tremendous postural and breathing improvement in my clients, but also profound shifts in awareness and advancement in their life processes.

I am currently certified in all four phases of the Sandlin Technique and trained to teach Phase I, moving the bones.

The Goddess in Every Woman

To say that my life has been defined by a spiritual quest is an understatement. As a child growing up in Ohio, my options for expression were fairly limited. I was raised in the Episcopal Church, an institution I admire for its forward thinking to this day. However, its cool restraint did not satisfy a deeper urging. I experimented with a variety of studies, from the intellectual intrigue of Buddhism to the emotional charge of Evangelical and Pentecostal Christianity.

The latter gave way to reason during my college years when a curriculum heavily laden with rhetoric and logic studies forced my brain to recognize certain incongruencies. Through it all an indefinable longing went unsatisfied.

I was well into my college years, which were more numerous than the average, when a friend of mine invited me to an unusual theater experience. She had been enlisted to run the lights and said that though the production was odd, she thought I would really get something out of it. The production was indeed odd, even off-putting, and I was aware of a number of audience members nodding off to sleep or drifting towards the door. I, on the hand, was spellbound. The poor performance not withstanding, this show was manna from heaven. The topic: "The Mother Goddess Myth."

In all my years of religious study, I had never learned the fundamental truth -- that long before the establishment of the "world's great religions" it was not a male deity who was worshipped but a female one. All over the planet, people honored the great creatrix, the Mother Goddess. Even now, vestiges of the original religion remain in images of the Virgin Mary, references to Mother Nature (who made occasional appearances in margarine ads), and deep within our cellular memory.

I was a sheltered Midwestern girl, and only recently transplanted to Northeastern New Jersey with its overwhelming proximity to Manhattan. Every day was a new and illuminating experience, but nothing could have prepared me for the magnitude of this information. It was like waking up from a dream. I knew I had found the key that opened the door to my truest spiritual expression.

Suddenly, I was seeing things in an entirely new context that explained my fascination with symbols like spirals and stars and even clarified poetry I'd already written. This was not new information. It was the reawakening of ancient memory.

Like many college students, I shared an apartment which housed a constantly changing cast of characters. One of the most intriguing was an artist who, I can see in retrospect, knew all about the Goddess but kept the knowledge to herself. She had moved out by this point but had left a couple of unusual items which I'd coveted and now claimed for myself. There were heavy ceramic spirals that served no practical use and a dress form that served as a vase for dried pussy willows.

The meaning of these items was now clear to me and my fascination with them explained. Spirals, a symbol found in many paleolithic artifacts, symbolizes the void of creation and represents the womb on many Goddess statues. The dress form, to me, illustrated one-ness of women and earth.

As time went by, I found that any religious system that diminished the feminine principle felt limited and untruthful. A brief stint with a Buddhist practice was like an uncomfortable shoe. I dismantled the Buddhist altar and started to use the small table as a catch-all. The dress form found its way there, then assorted crystals and other shiny objects that caught my eye. One evening, after cleaning and reorganizing my small room, I noticed that without even realizing it, I had built a new altar -- an altar dedicated to the Goddess.

Until that moment it hadn't occurred to me that this ancient mythology could be an active living spiritual practice, but its truth was awakening in every cell of my body. I resolved to research the ancient practices and learn to formally worship the Goddess.

The very next day, I visited Samuel Weiser Books, which was then on 24th St. in New York. To my amazement there was an entire book case devoted to Goddess religions. My eye was immediately drawn to bright yellow book called White Goddess by Robert Graves. I felt something like an electric charge as I began to read the jacket copy. After perusing some heavy impenetrable prose, I decided it was a little over my head grabbed a practical looking book on ritual practice.

Standing in the checkout line, I felt an indescribable urging in my gut. It was like a magnet in my abdomen was pulling me back to the shelves and back to White Goddess. I exchanged the two books and hastily paid the clerk before I could think too much about my decision. Reading that book was an amazing experience. I didn't understand 75% of it and didn't care. I was captivated and digested the contents of the book on another level of awareness.

This was how I learned to shop with my womb. I discovered that a deep sensation in my belly told me when a book, tape, crystal, or piece of jewelry was the next crucial step in my journey. I learned to trust my "women's intuition" and to reclaim the gifts of healing and magick that had been driven underground during the burning times in Medieval Europe when the witches were persecuted and their ancient Earth religion all but drummed out of existence.

Today Earth religions are experiencing a renaissance. All over the world people are rediscovering ancient teachings in the form of shamanism, witchcraft, paganism and more. The Goddess in all her forms is reawakening and reclaiming a planet on what appears to be the brink of destruction.

I knew society had made a major leap forward when I discovered that an Episcopal church in my area offered a labyrinth walk once a month. Walking the labyrinth, like the spiral dance, has its roots in ancient pagan culture. It did my soul good to attend a discussion group at that church where a female priest told the story of our ancient Celtic and Greek ancestors who worshipped the Earth itself in the form of a Mother Goddess.