Golgonooza

   In her previous book, American Cosmos  https://ncolloff.blogspot.com/2023/08/unidentified-flying-religions.html , Paskula, a religious studies professor, did a remarkable job of showing how the UFO ecosystem functioned and how it possessed the properties of an emerging religion. In this follow-up volume, she takes the advice of the distinguished UFO researcher, and West Coast venture capitalist Jacques Vallee, and returns to explore the experience of key experiencers of such phenomena. She discovers how our media mediated images of such encounters deviate from their living reality, often by excluding their spiritual/religious dimensions and their accompanying paranormal realities. I use the word 'realities' advisedly because though as a professional student of religion, Paskula concentrates on the phenomenology of people's life events and their emergent metaphysical and cosmological speculation, bracketing any view she takes as to their underlying truth or otherwise, y...

Bird of the Spirit, 1943, by Morris Graves The Bird in the Tree by Ruth Pitter The tree, and its haunting bird, Are the loves of my heart; But where is the word, the word, Oh where is the art, To say, or even to see, For a moment of time, What the Tree and the Bird must be In the true sublime? They shine, listening to the soul, And the soul replies; But the inner love is not whole, and the moment dies. Oh give me before I die The grace to see With eternal, ultimate eye, The Bird and the Tree. The song in the living Green, The Tree and the Bird – Oh have they ever been seen, Ever been heard? Winter Bouquet, 1977, by Morris Graves

  "We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” Or not quite, as Jack did not begin life on the island, which becomes home. When a primary school child, his father, a teacher, took him, and his mother, reluctantly from Glasgow, to the island, where he, the father, is to become the Headteacher of the local primary. Jack is grafted into island life, but the graft remains visible to child and islanders alike, this is not where he began, fully belonging is withheld, not unkindly but with the realism of places where communities grew up with one another, in lockstep, for good and ill. His transplantation is softened by his friendship, and growing if unarticulated love, for Sally, his peer both in the classroom and in their joint, quietly competitive athleticism.  Yet Jack's arc will lead him away, from Sally through tragedy, and by the draw first of professional football with Chelsea,...

  When is a bear, not a bear? Answer when it is a Jungian archetype! If you were Sioux, a bear was someone who, over generations of observation, had acquired a cluster of characteristics from which one could learn.  In their own right, they were intelligent creatures adapting to their world, living their own best life. A bear might choose to befriend you, possibly as a result of your beseeching, coming to you in vision and dream, one that might yield real-time effects - a healing song, say, or a new herb for a particular ailment, even self-decorating tips (for bears like to paint their faces with colored mud).  What a bear would not be would be a symbol generated from your own projecting consciousness, or, for that matter, as an animal, an inferior being. It might be true, as in Christianity, that humans were created last for the Sioux but this did not make them the apex of evolution (as they were in Jung's evolutionary frame) but the youngest and most foolhardy creature...

In 1944, C.G. Jung had a near-death experience and like many recipients of this experience found returning to the body challenging and was only ‘persuaded’ to do so by the sense that there was unfinished work for him to do. He experienced the subsequent return as a case of felt imprisonment. This sense that the everyday world we inhabit is seriously out of step with a deeper underlying and freeing reality is a common one. It is one of the key drivers of ‘religion’. We are not as we are meant to be. The world, as currently perceived, is, at best, awry, at worst, an imprisoning entrapment. Is this simply a misplaced uncertainty? One that should be dispelled from our minds with a healthy, materialist reminder that this is the only world that there is, or could possibly be. Purposefully enjoy it until the end comes, and all is finished. Learn to love your transiency! Yet, as Richard Smoley notes, in his recently published erudite, well-constructed and thoughtful book, "A Theology of L...

  In your New York apartment in 1971, days away from defending your PhD in Philosophy, you are listening to the music of John Coltrane when you notice an intense pattern of lights outside your window. They have no obvious origin - unidentified aerial phenomena would be their future designation - and your girlfriend, Jane, sees them too. They appear entrained to the music, answering it with their own dance. You watch haunted until they disappear and then you both rush to the rooftop, trying to figure out what you have just seen so marvelously. There a young drummer, who lives in the same block, and who you have just turned on to Coltrane’s music, has seen the lights to.  Three witnesses of a meaningful spiritual event held under the rubric of music. For the author, Michael Grosso, one of the prompts from this luminous event was to undertake a deeper exploration of music, music that prompted soul, that helped one go beyond the simply intellectual in life, at once opening it to t...