Hello is alright.

Here's the thing. In many ways I am new to the world of Integrality. But I'm not. Because I invented it. Yep. Really. Well okay not exactly. But all on my own I came to a realization one fine day that surely no one practice, discipline, book, teacher etc could have the whole entirety of truth all to themselves. Surely the 'Verse must be much much grander than that. Then one day I found A Brief History Of Everything by Ken Wilber (and boy aren't you all going to hate it when I write up my article on how Ken Wilber is the best spokesbeing Integral has right now full of flaws and failings though he may be.) and I was excited by the idea that other people had the same notion. However I have a problem. Well honestly I think it's a strength but I was trying to be, well not humble. Because I'm not. But I do try to be honest about my good and bad points. Any way. Whenever I get into something that seems to have someone that the something revolves around, I start to look for flaws. I start to look for the man behind the curtain. To know the fullness of the center. Good, bad, ugly, beautiful. And in searching I found this. Which frankly is more to my liking. I'm not much of a joiner, but I'm really not into joining things to be told how. To come together and share? Great. To sit and be told how to? Not so much. But here is kind of dead. Or asleep. And most of this nextwave stuff is a bit horribly off putting to many. And it's off putting to some because they aren't ready for it yet. Which is good. I mean people who aren't ready to be here, shouldn't be. It's frustrating to them and to us. But what about people who are ready? But maybe they are unsure. So how to be more active, and inviting. It's not easy. And I know that some people here will have made the classic mistake. They'll think, "But it's quiet here. Not a bunch of flame wars and hating. So what's so off putting?" But here's the thing. Whatever is not inviting is disinviting. Now I know it's silly. But it's true. If people don't feel actively welcomed and welcome they will begin to feel unwelcome.

So how to make people feel welcome? Well of course first of all there is the usual way. The old fashioned welcome wagon and such. Frankly I feel it's a little off putting that this fine place doesn't seem to have any kind of a getting to know you, intro thread (which I intend to correct by starting one). But also I think that there is an assumption that anyone who comes here, comes already knowing what Integral is all about. And I'm willing to bet that some people, maybe not many but some are going to stumble here from other paths. So maybe a little more info, or at least a wikipedia link wouldn't hurt. But also I think a good strategy would be to get people excited about the idea that Integral encompasses EVERYTHING. There is no idea, discipline, belief, theory etc. that does not feed the Integral machine. So how to get people in here? How to get them to stay? Well I've offered a few off the cuff thoughts. And that's all they are. And that's just as relates to this one place, this one expression of Integral. I'll have more thoughts later. Threat or promise? You decide. ;-)

Peace
And
Long
Life

Toriach

New Zealand Election November 2008

Helen Clark (or should I say New Zealand's Aunt) is surly a shoe in for a fourth consecutive term.

Why?

Firstly her opposition. National. The privatized party who fight politics like a bunch of school children. I challenge you Mr Key, to give your true
intentions for wanting to win the election. They are simply that,
because you want to win. But for who? The New Zealand public or
yourself.

Is it not true you were recorded after a cocktail party saying something very similar to “Theres nothing like winning in politics” and
then went on to basically say that you would say anything needed to
win the election, because winning is all politics is about. To me
this is just deception to fulfill your hunger of power.

National have always been the same. The last time they were in power for a period of time they sold off all our state assets. Then look at the
scandals following their last leader, one Don Brash.

I know there is too much at stake personally for National members, in big business to be trusted to care about the every man.

Your campaign! Are you trying to play the New Zealand public for Dummies?

These tax cuts you promise, really are not tax cuts at all. Where is the money coming from to fund them?

The retirement scheme that the New Zealand public have each been saving for, and that the Labour party spearheaded. Do you think you can give
us the stored equity inside Kiwi Saver that is rightly ours early,
then propagate nonsense to the unaware voters that you are putting
more money in our pockets?

Start working for New Zealanders and not you.

Secondly. Helen Clarke and the rest of the Labour government have been doing a stand up job for the families in New Zealand. and I am sure I speak
for a large percentage of New Zealand's public when I say Kiwis are
about the people, and we respect leaders who work for us, because
they are one of us.

Also as Kiwis, we are pretty good at sensing sincerity, and our PM Helen Clarke over the last 9 years has proven her motive and intention.

She is also a strong, progressive leader in a fast changing world.

The Moari and Pakeha of New Zealand have a bond between our races which may not be perfect, but is unique in the world and I also commend the Labour
party for their efforts in pushing through Treety settlements

Come on New Zealand. We do not want to see National get into power. Not without drastic change, and not when we have a well functioning government as
we do right now.

Vote Labour. Choose wise

Thank you..

A child's conception in synchronicity with divine touch
A new arrival with babies blue eyes, and the beautiful child is born crying
Angels rejoice and celebrate as baby feeds in mothers arms.
Heaven whispers, calm, the holly spirit reaches inside the young ones heart
attached are chords of silver, joining soul and flesh in correlated life
Revived, a spirits breathes once more upon its unfulfilled path
A heart with eyes that know many ages, meditating its way through this reoccurring dance.

This child ages in humanly discomposure, heedless in an enduring search
This child is special
Pure dreams relinquish sheepish thoughts, the
Conscious stills for the unveiled hearts honest ambition
No longer a fear among cause or reason, an angel grants the soul its key to infinite freedom

Endeavors continued with slow change in the quest of the surrendered
Where the child's olden thoughts would crash, new enlightenment had become faithful prayer
Head upon the pillow, Heaven heard the words so rare.

“God. I don't like to weigh down others, so I don't share my pains that need not be
Right now I return to you my life. I repent to you infinitely.”

“God, if it is your will, may I see truths to the burdens of this mind.
I feel like no one knows what it is like to love everything alive.
From small and unnoticed, to the big and beautiful open sky
From a grand child's new born innocence, to the grandparents glowing pride
From the lambs of spring, to the ancient mountain peeks and ravines
From the homeless man on the street, to the crowned Queen upon her seat.”

“God. My wish is for everyone to see as I that, love is your divine nature
For generations love has been diluted into misconception and confusion
With these eyes I, look back across times indefinitely ravaged by war.
Empires desires of conquest, rule and domination.
Greedy sentencing slavery upon needy
We see scars their children bare
Have their tears ceased?
I don't think so
A repression fueled generation is focused on revenge
Is vengeance just?
With which hands did we sin?
Our Father's, Fathers, Father?
In which mind do we repent?
In ourselves here now?
Who is any man to judge?
What fool cannot see the innocence in any child's eyes regardless of ancestry.
That fool surely holds no love above own pride”

“God. I feel as if we have a dependency to be lead.
Governments are curbing the insanity ineffable chaos, yet
the seats of leaders evolved out of sin.
Kings and those alike act in extortion and greed, these
shepherds of selfish desires are the fires from which we breathe
So, which of us is fit to lead?
The herd follows tied up and learned of bitter ways.
Neighbor against neighbor we're competing for any grain
We hear cries of misfortune, peoples tortured by the cycles of hate.
These iron chains binding the blind with pain, each soul captured forming a new link, from kings to peasants we repeat the same foolish masquerade”

“God. I wish to be shown clear a path for me
A way to achieve all I can, and to stand with a certainty for my quest”



In a state of near slumber, deep in the spirits mist, the
Almighty's hand rested upon the child's shoulder just as a strong and unmistakable voice began to whispered softly.

“My child. Rest your weary head upon my being,
Let me alleviate the worry, the pain, the hardships, and frustrations.
My child, I never gave you those emotions, they are love lost.
They each arose in anxiety of your separation from me
They each evolved to separate you among yourselves
They each are tools which evil has produced, not by choice, but in its arrogance.
All the hate, pain, anger, frustrations, and emptiness arose from leaving my infinity
The separation from the self righteous quest for mans own wisdom.
Wisdom minds cannot conceive.
When Adam silently watched Eve eat the forbidden fruit from the forbidden tree, so began the
loves undoing.
But my child. It is alright, I wish us not to dwell on what you have now come to see.”

“You know that unity is freedoms key.
In this age of information, reach, reach, and reach out to expand the inclusion.
Work with your passions to help
Build Charity as an open book, be devoted selflessly.
I will give you bread, I will keep you dry.
Show the masses my light, but
always keep blame, anger and judgment aside.

“Rise up my child. In ways the world so craves for.
Lead serve me, and serve all through me
Yearn to reach youth and to treat the collective needs
Love all, serve all and above all, behold Eve as your beautiful queen
My child, you will not be forgotten.
If no one sees, know that I see
If no one applauds, know that the Angels will sing”

today morning when i got up , the first question which knock down my mind was , will human clones have psychic being ???

well not a bad one , just sharing with you all...

I'm not sure I like Sri Aurobindo's name being pulled quite irrelevantly into the title of a previous post.

If mankind could but see though in a glimpse of fleeting experience what infinite enjoyments, what perfect forces, what luminous reaches of spontaneous knowledge, what wide calms of our being lie waiting for us in the tracts which our animal evolution has not yet conquered, they would leave all & never rest till they had gained these treasures. But the way is narrow, the doors are hard to force, and fear, distrust & scepticism are there, sentinels of Nature, to forbid the turning away of our feet from her ordinary pastures. -- Sri Aurobindo

Things being a little slow here I thought I would re-publish a piece from my Integral Liberties blog...

It comes up from time to time when I think of Sri Aurobindo. Like I wrote in the first essay on this blog, I cannot relate well to the man at all except for the fact that he was mightily overtaken by the Spirit while in prison and on trial for his life. It is a common syndrome, the jail house conversion. I recall he sat through his trial in something of an ecstatic, non-dual trance. I cannot say I knew personally anyone who could make the same claim. Michael, who's story I tell below, sat through his in a trance but it was not of the sort where the consciousness is overwhelmed in the ineffable apprehension of cosmic wholeness. Michael's was induced to overcome some of the side effects of his conversion and to set him up...but to all of that soon enough.

Killing The Beast, I believe, was the name of the thread that Jana (Jaguar here on Open Source) started some months ago on one of the many forums that help civilians in Integral Province stay in touch. If I correctly recall I posted something and then was still drafting another, the one found below, when the direction of the thread changed; it went tangent or was jacked by chatters and dribbled out toward entropic stasis and the AADD diffusion that often characterizes the provisional forums. So I let this piece hibernate in some virtual closet. About two years ago I hauled it back out, shot it up with a little adrenaline, tidied the style and added a bit or two, found it suitable again for public consumption and hung it on the board at Integral Visioning. Now I'm nailing it to this page:

So we wonder at The Beast. I've been an artist too long so I tend to forget, I no longer remember to wonder each morning at The Beast. But today might be the time to be conscious again in this manner to see what we are trying to kill here and what we would be well advised to keep of The Beast. For 18 years, doing work as a p.i., I tried to keep people from going to jail, or to get them out of jail, or to keep them off the gurney that rolls down the concourse to the Needle. The Beast roams at large in that concourse and breathes in, breathes out through that slight steel tube. My client Michael was on his way there once.

Michael talked to the wall for a month, maybe more, after he turned himself in. He was a sweet young man, quiet and dutiful, with a wife and a baby a week away. He had a job and a car. The Beast rode in that car because he put the two young women in the trunk and took them out east of Albuquerque and killed one with his knife and the tire iron, but the other, with 17 stab wounds and two skull fractures got away. Michael's wife helped him turn himself in and he didn't talk to anyone except The Virgin who apparently finds a residence in the wall of many an institution. The Beast slept in the bunk while Michael no doubt spilled his life to Our Lady of the Psych Ward Wall and he probably talked of cars, his car, his mother's car when he was young and Mom let her brother sodomize her son in the back seat on their way into town. Cars; it will be a long time until Michael rides in one for he will probably live out his life somewhere near the concourse where The Beast lives and breathes. The Beast breathed enormous doses of stelazine and thorazine into Michael while he was standing trial so that he wouldn't get distracted into a chat with Our Lady of the Court House Floor because that would make him look insane and someone incompetent of committing a capital crime. And though he wasn't competent and wasn't guilty in the capital definition, the State liked The Beast's breath because it made Michael look sane enough and sociopathic enough (Google "stelazine stare") for a jury to want to kill him. And it worked. But we got him free of Death Row and his mother was touched with the work we did to save her baby, Michael, the good little boy she beat up on a few too many times.

There was another guy who was talking in those days to Our Lady of the Cell Block Wall. They called him Weepie. Weepie and a man with the last name Chavez killed Joe A. in the Cell Block 3 (Maximum Security) exercise yard where The Beast was working out while the two stabbed Joe A. 47 times before the guards got him free of his handcuffs. Weepie needed that kill for some inside credibility and I think that when Ricky issued the contract on Joe A. he picked Weepie as a favor. Ricky looked out after his people that way. Weepie needed someone like Ricky to front for him because Weepie was the skinniest guy in the joint, he had that wretched name because he still had his tear-drop tat from his juvie days, and worst of all he looked just like Olive Oyle. Chavez had wanted to kill Joe A. on his own and he didn't want to be in trial with Weepie because Weepie was just Weepie and that was a bad drug on the Chavez image especially now that Weepie had religion and was enjoying long and fruitful exchanges with Our Lady of the Protective Custodial Wall. The Beast was all round that morning while Chavez was telling me this. I was working for the widow of Joe A. in her civil rights and wrongful death suit against the State of New Mexico. Chavez, whose business with the A. Family had been successfully concluded, hoped she could loot the State for all she could carry away. And, indeed, she made out alright because it wasn't hard to prove that the Warden knew and the Captain of the Shift knew and the Lieutenant for Cell Block 3 knew, and the Assistant Warden for Security knew and even the New Mexico State Secretary of Corrections knew that Joe A. was going to be killed if he went into the exercise yard that morning and they did nothing at all, nothing, to stop it. The Beast had been busy all around.

Ricky was already on Death Row the morning they killed Joe A.; sent there for having killed that other Cell Block 3 prisoner from Las Cruces and the new guard with one week's tenure, both at the same time, both of them in the middle of Cell Block 3 where no two prisoners were to be out of their segregated cells at the same time. (Ricky was a wizard.) At his sentencing to The Needle, Ricky looked the new guard's mother in the eye and apologized for killing her son, but the kid had, in effect, committed suicide when he tried to stop Ricky from doing what he needed to do which was to kill the guy from Las Cruces.

Ricky laughed when he told me this, but then he said he meant it and he genuinely felt sorry for her, sitting there in court looking like just another sorry assed Anglo woman with the thinnest kind of blood and the weakest sort of will.

Quite often when I went into that prison to chase the facts around I would have them bring Ricky in from Death Row so the two of us could kick back in the legal interview room, Ricky would drink the Coca Cola I brought him while I told him why I was there and then he could pass the word on his way back to his cell that it was alright to talk with me. It was like a courtesy call.

Ricky and I were hanging there one morning when into the adjacent room the guards ushered a fat, middle aged, red faced White guy who was doing life for a couple of psychopathic motivated murders. He had spent almost his entire sentence in protective custody because he was "mental," a freak, and as such wasn't tolerated well in such close confines. But some months before, due to overcrowding, the administration had farmed him out to a county jail in an end- of-the-world kind of hamlet called Estancia. He behaved himself so well there the Sheriff made him the office dispatcher on the night shift. Three nights before we saw him there in the next room, the fat man had walked away from the dispatcher's desk and caught a ride to Albuquerque . The night after that he hired a cab to take him to a restaurant and on their arrival had killed the cabby and had been hauled down by some bystanders and witnesses when he tried to run. He was back in custody within 10 minutes and back in prison almost as soon. When the guards brought him in to see his lawyer, Ricky's blood went up. He forgot I was in the room, forgot perhaps how to talk. His focus froze on the Fat Man and we sat there for almost five minutes without words. I said nothing, just listened to Ricky breathe because the Fat psychopath was a loose cannon, loose on Ricky's watch and he wanted the Fat Man dead because Ricky had more power in that prison than the warden and a responsibility to keep it orderly. Ricky was not a psychopath, he was a warrior from a cultural substrate with alternative values, and perspectives, and economies that generally ran totally counter to the norm. His sentence to The Needle was commuted to Life the same time Michael's was, along with five others. We cleaned up that day; it was on a Thanksgiving.

The County Sheriff who used the Fat Man as a dispatcher lost his job the next election, it was no big surprise. A few months later he and I were sitting around a vacant jury room in the court house in a town called Los Lunes. It was a criminal trial. I was working for the defense and he was a witness for the prosecution. He asked if I had heard what had happened that morning in Santa Fe. No, I had not because I'd been away from home for a couple of days. So he told me the story of a man named Andy who had been charged with first degree murder. Andy's lawyer, a few weeks prior, had pled him to the lesser charge of second degree, and the previous day the judge sentenced him to seven years in prison with the obligation to pay the former wife of the man he killed $100,000 restitution to make up for the child support she would no longer receive. Early that morning Andy went to the former wife's mobile home and shot her dead. He then went to the court house to take the judge hostage while he made his break for god knows where. But the judge was late in coming to work and that screwed Andy's plan. He tried to run and a deputy sheriff, a Santa Clara Pueblo Indian named Naranjo, brother of a friend of mine, shot him down. Naranjo put a pistol full of bullets into Andy in the lobby of the Santa Fe County Court House where The Beast was all around. I thought, as I listened to this story, of how I had less than six months before sat at Andy's kitchen table and talked with his wife and son and him about how the man he killed, the uncle of his son's wife, had been threatening his son, threatening Andy too. One day the word was out that the uncle-in-law and another family member were going to make good on the threat that night. The son went out looking for the pair. Andy, out of his mind with worry, went out to find the three of them. He confronted the uncle in the drive way of the mobile home where his former wife lived. Andy thought the man was reaching for a weapon that was said to be always close at hand. Andy pulled a pistol, shot twice, hit once and drove away. The Uncle walked across the driveway, sat down on the steps to the former wife's front door and bled to death with The Beast lounging there beside him.

Andy was a shy, pleasant, worried, round little middle class lath and plaster contractor who had an acute brain disorder triggered by fermented barley. They found out about that one too late and the judge would not let it be admitted into evidence at the sentencing where The Beast was watching from the back row.

The next night I left Los Lunas and headed south to a mountain town with a cowboy dealer who had hired me to help his lawyer make 24 ounces of cocaine, thirteen pounds of marijuana, two and a half gallons of crystal meth, a couple blocks of hash, and 1,200 tabs of LSD legally disappear because to all involved the FBI had obviously lied on the sworn affidavit for the search warrant, an act that should make those pharmaceuticals inadmissible as evidence. After I had spent several days finding witnesses to the fed's big lie, the cowboy came around and told me that the next day he had a meeting with Another Busted Dealer and they were going to be talking snitches and rats. But the two men didn't know each other, or each others friends, or each others enemies, or anyone's real name and neither knew where the other one stood on the issues of a high-rolling cattleman dealer who always got busted but never was charged, or the guy who got his product wholesale along the border in guns-for-drug deals and who had been busted a few weeks before and might have been the one who had rolled over on them. When the feds searched the house of the gun runner they found an original Yoko Ono piece hanging above the couch. It had once been stolen in a burglary at the Dakota Hotel and god knows The Beast hung there. The gun runner told the cowboy and me that he had always thought the piece was a copy. We'd had our meeting with this man on foot along a dirt road that ran through the hills, his call. And we had every reason to believe that he had a second who wasn't all that far away with a rifle because things can turn funny-shaped suddenly when strangers are talking snitches and rats. That was why the cowboy asked me to be in place to take up his slack if the meeting went sour with the Other Busted Dealer.

I was the first one at the 7-11 parking lot, site of the rendezvous. The cowboy had rented for my driving pleasure and general transport a Lincoln Town Car and this was where I was topping off the tank. The Other Busted Dealer and his side-kick showed up next. I knew them for their Jeep CJ and their ski clothes, the two guys I was going to start shooting at, if and when... They went inside and I went in behind them. One bought a candy bar and the other one jerky. I paid for the gas and bought a newspaper to cover my pistol that lay between me and The Beast in the passenger seat. The Cowboy showed up last in his pickup and the Other Busted Dealer, quick like, climbed in beside him and off they drove. I slipped the Lincoln out onto the highway behind them just ahead of the sidekick in the Jeep. The trick was to stay three cars back and still make all the same lights. They drove into the hills on a winding road and pulled into the back lot of a time-share complex. I drove past, around a hairpin switchback and pulled to a stop on the wrong side of the road right above the pickup and watched the animated conversation through its rear window.

I had time then to take what seemed like a leisurely inventory of my life to that date and I found that I could not have been more pleased with where I had been, where I sat now and who I was. Robert Service once wrote: "The world's a jolly good joke to him, and now is the time to laugh, " so I did. And I found a familiar heat rising up my spine, radiating into the viscera, infusing my heart with delicious longing, doubling my lung capacity, forcing into my throat; if I had then anything to say it probably would have been spoken in a language that no one else had ever heard either. When it reached my ears all the white noise within miles became harmonized notes in the perfect overture to this highly localized little celebration. And then I saw all into eternity turn crisp and glowing, and despite the vividness of shape and color, eradicate all boundaries and all frontiers, and fuse with me into an indivisible totality; shipped straight back to the non-dual again...in a clumsy Lincoln Town Car with only a newspaper, a pistol, and The Beast.

Everything seemed straight between the Cowboy and the Other Busted Dealer who got out of the pickup and strolled across the lot to a time share. I drove down past the driveway just before the Cowboy pulled onto the road to show him I was still around and still on the clock. I don't suppose given all the events that The Beast was too disappointed...there was after all a little commonality with the Sri.

An open-access e-journal published by Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education in Pondicherry (Puducherry), India, AntiMatters addresses issues in science and the humanities from non-materialistic perspectives.
Contents
Prelude to the Fifth Issue
An introduction to radical constructivism
Ernst von Glasersfeld
Facts and the self from a constructivist point of view
Ernst von Glasersfeld
Learning as a constructive activity
Ernst von Glasersfeld
Evolution of consciousness according to Jean Gebser
Ulrich J Mohrhoff
Evolution vs. naturalism: why they are like oil and water
Alvin Plantinga
A comment on Alvin Plantinga, “Evolution vs. naturalism”
Ulrich J Mohrhoff
Following the bread crumbs to the end of ultimate meaning
Avraham Allan Cohen
The scientific exploration of consciousness: towards an adequate epistemology
Willis Harman
The atheist delusion: answering Richard Dawkins
Greg Taylor
Synchronicity: the key to destiny
Frank Joseph
Review of What A Coincidence! – The Wow! factor in synchronicity and what it means in everyday life
by Susan M. Watkins
Review of The Scalpel and the Soul: Encounters with Surgery, the Supernatural, and the Healing Power of Hope
by Alan J. Hamilton
Review of Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion
by Stuart A. Kauffman
Review of Living on Purpose: Meaning, Intention, and Value
by Graham Dunstan Martin
Excerpts from 21 Days into the Afterlife
by Piero Calvi-Parisetti
Excerpts from Gateway to the Dao-Field: Essays for the Awakening Educator
by Avraham A Cohen
The Spiritual Evolution of Society: Excerpts from The Human Cycle
by Sri Aurobindo

Nineteen sixty-three was the year that Martin Luther King, Jr. preached his famous "I Have a Dream" speech at the March on Washington. It was also the year that I was born. Although just an infant, I imbibed something of that utopian spirit of the 1960s and this has shaped so many of my adult choices. I didn't actually hear that sermon until I was around twelve, but it was one more confirmation of my utopian mindset.

"I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain and the crooked places will be made straight and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together"

This paragraph is based on a Biblical passage, which is one of the most utopian in the whole canon. I was raised on the Bible and inspired by passages like this one. However, it may be that this message is not the dominant theme in the Bible. There is plenty of pessimism and, what seem to me, backward ideas in it as well.

It seems my life has been about journeying from pessimism towards utopianism. My father, also a preacher, was a classic hell-fire and brimstone Pentecostal. No utopian heaven on earth for him. He preached against liberals, feminists, and peaceniks. In short, he preached against everything I have become. And that, as they say, is a story in itself.

Breaking with Pessimism

After graduating from high school in 1981, I attended a Pentecostal college, and it was there I first began to think outside the pessimistic viewpoint I had inherited. The first break came over a matter of doctrine that might seem minor to folks outside Pentecostalism, but it made a world of difference to me in that context. The standard doctrine said that Jesus was going to "rapture" all real Christians from earth, leaving most humans behind to face the "Great Tribulation." The horrors of Armageddon, massive earthquakes, plagues, and fiery comets would be rained down on sinners for seven years.

I came to believe that God wouldn't deprive the earth of his best servants during earth's darkest hours. I believed that Christians would face the Antichrist and be used by God to resist evil's power. This deviation set me apart as a heretic and a radical. After all, to Pentecostals, being a Christian was about saving souls and going to heaven. The earth was a hopeless cause. I had begun a long journey of rejecting a deeply ingrained world-hatred. I didn't return to college for another seven years.

Reaching for Love and Community

Before I left college, I did manage to meet and fall in love with my wife, Teresa. She seemed intrigued by my "radicalism" in contrast to most of the other students and teachers. One of my few campus radical buddies was her good friend and that made it easier for her to accept me. We became good friends while touring with the college choir, and eventually a romance blossomed.

We married in November of 1982, and began a search for whatever utopia we could find together. I was still finding inspiration in the Bible and this time it was found in Acts 4:32:

"Now the whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common."

Four years later, we moved to Evanston, IL to become part of a Christian community, Reba Place Fellowship, which utilized a common treasury.

Just before that move, love came into my life in its purest form. My daughter Melissa was born on October 10, 1985. My father once said to me that he never felt truly experienced pure love until my little sister was born. I now knew what that meant. Even though I have always felt like fathering was challenging, I still see in my children -- my son was born three years later -- the truest legacy I will ever create. No job or masterpiece I could craft will have the same impact or meaning as my children.

Fatherhood

Let me digress about fatherhood a bit. My own father, as may be obvious by now, was an angry and unhappy person and abusive towards his wife and children. We led a double life, with Dad preaching Jesus and salvation in church, but giving us pain and unhappiness in the home.

Although I had an instant bond with my daughter, when my son, Christopher, was born, it was harder to feel that same affection. I can't recall my father ever expressing genuine love for me. I have worked through that resistance, but my father's patterns of short-tempered lashing out still lurk in my subconscious.

Once we settled in to the Reba Place community, I began to work at healing the pain and suffering of my childhood. After one of my angry explosions was aimed directly at my lovely little girl, I had no choice but to get into therapy. I was diagnosed with depression and began an eight-year pursuit of emotional healing.

There were two breakthroughs in therapy. First of all, I reconnected with my "inner child" in a very intense therapy session. I know that this idea is much scoffed at, and the session did not start out with that goal. We were revisiting a pivotal childhood experience of abuse. As we worked through memories, it became clear that a part of myself had been deeply damaged and unable to cope with that experience. It was only as I embraced that abused child part of myself that I began to heal from all that pain.

The second breakthrough was more mundane. I had been placed on anti- depressants as far back as 1987, but they all had fairly limited effects. Not long afterwards, Prozac was released, but I didn't take it until much later. When I finally did so, it worked its famous magic on me. Within a few months all my depressive thoughts subsided and I knew that I was fully cured. This is not the typical case, of course, but I have been symptom-free for over seven years. I do not know how much a factor the "inner child" breakthrough was in the success of the medication. My guess is that they reinforced each other.

Departing Reba, Embracing Quakerism

My life at Reba Place came to an end a couple of years later. My new emotional health gave me a new freedom in religious matters, and for all its good things, Reba Place was still holding on to traditions and ideas that began to feel constrictive. My journey towards utopia was about to take a new turn.

Reba Place was part of the Mennonite Church, a biblically based peace church. I was drawn there as much by pacifism as by the communal lifestyle. I began to go through serious questioning of the Bible and Christian doctrines, including doubts about Jesus' divinity and resurrection, the nature of God, and the authority of the Bible. I was still a pacifist and religious, but I needed to find a new community that could accommodate someone given to heretical ideas about religion.

I found that community in another utopian sect, the Religious Society of Friends, commonly called "Quakers." While they started out with a biblicism similar to the Mennonites, modernism and unorthodox ideas became much more accepted among one branch of Quakers about a hundred years ago. Many Quakers had been involved in the struggle for the abolition of slavery, but this experience undermined the traditional culture of Quakerism as world-shunning sect. They shifted from a vision of communal perfection to one of social service and activism. This new focus brought Quakers into contact with unorthodox ideas about the Bible and Christianity. Quakers had already undergone some splits over doctrine, but the faction that embraced modern activism and theology has become today one of the most theologically diverse religious bodies in the USA.

I located the closest Quaker meeting to my home and began attending just over four and a half years ago [this was written in 2001]. Among Quakers I have found a community that I believe will be my spiritual home for the rest of my life. They are far from perfect, but part of my healing has been accepting imperfection both in myself and in others.

Still Longing for Utopia

A. J. Muste, the pacifist founder of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, once remarked that his demonstrations against war were not only about changing the world, they were also intended to keep the world from changing him. That resonates with how I regard my utopian spirit. While I have been changed many times in many ways, those changes have been aimed at purifying the utopian impulse. The 1960s still stand out for me as a period of history when lots of people discovered a vision of a better world. They failed to realize it completely, but I believe the world is better for that vision having dawned in the lives it did.

As for where my utopian impulse will take me next, that's something of a mystery to me, as it has been all along. I know that one of my real gifts is writing and there is so much to be written about the details of utopian visions. I have had a couple of articles published and really hope one day to write a longer book on my experience and philosophy.