A Message of Hope for the Ages

 

Arjuna and the Lord Krishna

In the world-renowned Sanskrit scripture known as the Bhagavad Gita, the Lord Krishna, who is Hinduism's supreme manifestation of the deity, extends a message of great hope to his close friend, the warrior Arjuna.

Whenever life on earth grows bleak because ignorant men have filled the nations with violence and greed, Krishna teaches, God is once again incarnated among us as the savior of humanity. Since this is so, darkness can never achieve a decisive victory over the light, and gravity can never overcome the power of Antigravity.

Whether this business about the incarnation of divinity is literally true or not, the symbolic significance of Krishna's words is so sublime that they should never be forgotten.

Yes, the counsel is clear: When things look bleakest, and you are tempted to despair, help is on the way. "Hope springs eternal in the human breast," as Alexander Pope put it. So may it spring in yours!
 

New Realms of Beauty

 

With the advent of technologies
that allow us to prevail over gravity,
we have entered entirely
new realms of beauty.

 

Higher Vistas and Lower

 

Joseph Campbell in Myths to Live By :

"I have noticed . . . when flying -- particularly over oceans -- that the world of sheerly physical nature, of air and cloud and the marvels of light there experienced, is altogether congenial. Here on earth it is to the lovely vegetable nature-world that we respond; there aloft, to the sublimely spatial . . .

". . . with each expansion of the horizon, from the troglodytal cave to the Buddhist temple on the hilltop -- and on now to the moon -- there has been, as there must inevitably be, not only an expansion of consciousness, in keeping with ever-widening as well as deepening insights into the nature of Nature (which is of one nature with ourselves), but also an enrichment, refinement, and general melioration of the conditions of human physical life."

A little commentary on Campbell:

What this means is that our minds are expanding whether we want them to or not, and so our more conventional thoughts are just as doomed to obsolescence as the worldview of medieval people. There is, therefore, no immortality in going along with the crowd and lazily believing what everyone else believes.

If you would avoid becoming a ridiculous little footnote to a worldview that is disappearing even as you continue to dedicate your life to it, if you would avoid being erased and nullified by the continuing evolution of human consciousness, then you have no choice but to rise up above the gravitational pull of the mass culture of your time -- you have to choice but to embrace Antigravity.

 

 

The Great Seal of
the State of Antigravity

In order for the eye to focus
and see far, it must
detach itself and
rise upward from the
gravitationally fixed base below.

 

To Fly or to Die

Yes, sometimes it's actually that stark,
the choice between maintaining the power of
flight or perishing with the weight of gravity
pressing down on your useless wings,
as we can learn from the story of
the feathered but flightless dodo bird.

The dodo evolved from a normal flying pigeon
and settled into flightlessness because
it encountered no natural predators
after it had flown across the Indian Ocean and
taken up residence on the island of Mauritius,
which is found off the east coast of Africa.

Dodos tended to become overweight,
with adult birds eventually tipping
the scales at around 50 pounds.


In spite of that, dodos were doing pretty
well until some unnatural predators in
the form of dogs, pigs, and cats eventually
arrived in the company of the Portuguese
and Dutch sailors who reached Mauritius
for the first time in the 16th and 17th centuries.

No chance then to fly away to live another day!
Instead, with its limited locomotion and its
offspring vulnerable in nests on the ground,
the dodo's eventual doom was sealed.


Not even its inclusion in Lewis Carroll's
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
could bring the dodo back to life,
but the bones of the birds are still
being discovered and studied,
so that, although the dodo is extinct,
we know more about it today than
at any other time in history.

Unfortunately, that's not much of a
consolation prize when you've lost
the battle to survive. If I'd been
a dodo, I'd rather that my lineage
remain alive, and my choice would
have been not to die but to embrace
the Antigravitational solution,
which is to fly, yes, to fly.

Open Skies and Wonder

One reader writes:



The eloquent little cartoon
in the corner of this message
brought to my mind something
that William Blake wrote in a poem
called "The Marriage of Heaven & Hell":

". . . man has closed himself up,
till he sees all things through
narrow chinks of his cavern."

Sadly, being closed up is pretty
much the human condition
in a commercial era like the one
that we inhabit, so it should come
as no surprise when we yield
to the force of gravity and find
ourselves missing a sense
of closeness to God.

How, then, can we open back up?
How can we restore ourselves
to our birthright, which is to
experience the joy of living in
an endlessly fascinating universe?

In order to do that, we have to notice
that life is going on everywhere
around us, and that most of it
is sweet and even astonishing
in its richness and spontaneity.

When we widen our vision,
we see open skies and wonder,
and we understand that the dread
and loneliness that we sometimes
feel is only a mood that
overtakes us when we lose
the power of spiritual vision.

Fortunately, the psyche tends
to be a self-correcting system,
and sooner or later we begin
to remember that our blessings
far outweigh our troubles.

If I had to reduce this bit
of encouragement to several sentences
that would fit on a note card,
I'd guess I'd come up
with something like this:

And maybe if we rallied our forces
and shook ourselves awake,
we'd quit staring at our knees
and start to focus on something
that's far more interesting
than our smaller selves
and their earthly cares.

Such things abound--you know?

Of course you know!

The First & Second Births

Giotto's vision of St. Francis
ascending into heaven:

The first birth is into gravity.

The second birth is out of gravity, into Antigravity.

For gravity is of the flesh,

but Antigravity is of the spirit.