SUMMARY
OF LEARNERS INTRO & VOCAB
“… Citizens seeking to introduce changes in the form of their government, whether in favor of liberty or despotism, ought to consider what materials they have to deal with and then judge of the difficulty of their task. For it is no less arduous and dangerous to attempt to free a people disposed to live in servitude, than to enslave a people who [opt] to live free.” Niccolo Machiavelli, Discourse on the First Decade of Titus Livius, Ninian Hill Thomson, Trans., Kegan, Trench & Co., London, 1883, p. 376.
I’ve waited for some thirty years, now, for some worthy patron to discover LEARNERS, publish it in many languages and make our fortune; otherwise, that I might vanish quietly from this world without having to bother with the upshot of my intervention.
It's amazing how lily-livered and chicken-brained well-connected people are, how many imaginary perils and empty distractions they must give priority to, and how they insulate themselves from important but unforeseen matters with armies of shortsighted subordinates.
Here I am still working alone; my oft rewritten and oft rejected samizdat self-published on the World Wide Web. After decades of intellectual house arrest, forced to witness so-called activists and progressives congratulate themselves that reactionary backlash has not grown too exponentially during their watch, and for having avoided the obnoxious chore of studying LEARNERS. Forced to notice churlish warmongers earn cash bonuses and distinction by publishing reams of best-selling martial pomp, and every government trip over itself to fulfill their least stipulation, while no one dares call them on their kamikaze swan song! I’ve grown weary and gray from this universal dismissal. How much better the world could be without so much preventable misery!
As I review this text, its cosmic presumption stuns me. No special privilege entitles me to claim your time and attention; no lofty reputation, mighty patronage, personal charisma, business savvy, saintly complacency or literary merit. When I find decent work, I’m just another clerk and a distracted one at that. Nonetheless, I must claim your careful consideration here. This may be the most important text you read; that’s up to you and your fondness for the status quo.
I’ve long dreamt of escaping from this madhouse and repatriating into Grace – somewhere out there beyond the white light – yet there’s so much love and beauty here. I’ve stayed up late nights reviewing the same botched political experiments and muttering, “At least one of these ought to have worked out to spec!”
I still dare hope. Learners are a Nation among nations, a state of being within the State. In our own quiet way, once properly inspired, we command enough talent and initiative to tackle any challenge. Once we Learners recognize each other, realize how numerous we are and the commanding position we hold over the world; once we rally around these ideas, we will be unstoppable and destined for glory—no matter how wretched and powerless human isolates may be with their petty pecking orders.
Aghast, I understood King Ashoka’s torment. Standing back-to-back in this carnage of our own making, we watched helplessly as millipede columns of weeping refugees crawled past us from the smoking wreckage of every horizon. Neither of us could escape our complicity in this disgrace, nor could we stand by, idle and indifferent. We had to do something: lunge for that big brass ring dangling just beyond our wildest dreams; blow the doors off our fragile confidence, competence and self-worth; risk everything to reduce the atrocity of the human condition.
This LEARNERS text isn’t incised in stone.
Dedicated specialists, amateur and pro alike, should chew over all of its
assumptions. Their discussions may shape
a brilliant
Every cubic yard of earth, water, air and vacuum contains all the energy in the Universe (minus 1?). We must become clever enough to reach into this cosmic fire and warm our hands therein, yet not burn our fingertips or the world. Otherwise, we’re just ignorant beggars who stumble parched and starving across a desert while untold abundance lies quietly locked below our feet.
We are sitting down together – you and I and everyone – to share a giant, super-deluxe pizza. It stretches out to the horizon and beyond that to infinity. It is covered with good things to eat. It has mounds of perfect vegetables, creamy cheese, aromatic spices and deli delicacies: all the toppings of the world’s finest pizza. It’s got college degrees, fair housing and low infant mortality; enough abundance, justice and serenity for everyone; anything anyone could ask for and more of it than we could imagine, much less find use for.
Too bad we only look down a one-degree slice of this pie. The sorriest of slices, saturated with want, fear and pain. It’s stripped bare, burned to the third degree and unbelievably unappetizing. It’s been combed over at sword-point for ages. Across it, starving children cower in stoic tears, in bunkers, hovels and refugee dumps: poster children of our failure and guilt. We can’t see anything but this WeaponWorld of ours, the napalm-blackened crust of a burnt-out world. Starving for something better, we scramble after its crumbs with microscopic compulsion.
The infinite leftover heaping with untouched goodies? It is beyond sight, as far as we’re concerned. We’ve partitioned the other 359 degrees of this cosmic pizza, blinkered as we’ve been by long-revered cultural conventions. Our culture issues blinkers to us at birth, which grow more restrictive as we age. They screen us from PeaceWorld and focus our attention on WeaponWorld. As a result, we dismiss this abundance as mere idealism, myth, dream, fantasy, utopia and science fiction.
Learners can polarize those blinkers we wear, and show the whole pie to everyone simultaneously. This festive bounty is certainly there for us to harvest on PeaceWorld. We just need to clear our vision, roll up our sleeves and make it happen. Then it would be harvest time, and most people would be too busy gathering and sharing this incredible abundance to cause further harm.
A half-lifetime ago, as I began testing the shaky legs of my new-foaled opinions, my father challenged me thus: “It’s easy to condemn institutions,” this charming Bayard told me. I’ll always remember him as a chevalier sans peur et sans reproche: a knight both fearless and without blame.
That’s a tricky combination, come to thing of it. It would be easy to inflict harm when armed with some illusion of fearlessness. “I don’t give a damn; let loose the dogs of war!” It’s only slightly more difficult to do good from fear of harmful consequences. The truest goal would be to make use of that total fearlessness to do nothing but good. My fearless father strove for nothing but that in his life, which made him a nobleman in the finest sense of the term. No lesser behavior is praiseworthy.
So you think yourself fearless? Fine. Do good without counting the cost and prove it. A little trick you must play in your head. Can you do it?
The above paragraph may be the most important one for sociopaths who recognize their predicament and for their friends who see it in them. I suggest that those people reread it very carefully. It may contain the cure to their disease and the swiftest road to PeaceWorld.
“Criticize institutions? Don’t bother,” this gentle cavalier told me, “unless you can come up with better alternatives.”
I've knocked myself out, since, trying to come up with those famous alternatives. As a child of the greasy 50’s, I found capital-R Revolution revolting: its runny blemishes more telling than its watery promises. Among its worst failures, after untold suffering, it offered nothing more than the inadmissible present with frequent backslides. Revolutionary dialectics (and every thesis they sprang from) became cheap talk to me—culture’s inflamed reaction to orthodoxy’s stunted mediocrity.
No Great Book On Peace exists even though students cram Clausewitz’s On War in every college. Believe me, I searched the stacks in vain, for On Peace.
Midway through my mandatory obedience training – once I’d gotten good and fed up with it – I began combing available libraries for a primer on the administration of world peace. You know, a real civics lesson for a serious world citizen? So what if it were nothing but science fiction and wild-eyed speculation? I’d settle for that!
All I found was On War and elementary textbooks on weapon management. There were countless histories, devout religious texts, pompous political screeds, literary soap operas and nut-cracking philosophical quibbles. All of them sustained weapon mentality and diverted our attention from what should have been our primary study all along: peace mentality. Otherwise, they talked about feelings, or sentiment, or technicalities or meaningless abstractions or some such worthless trash. As my readings grew more voracious and less picky, they led me to more and more ponderous, elaborate and boring affirmations of weapon mentality. A mountain range of useless trivia aside, I found very little else, to tell you the truth.
Avid for the peace primer I never found, I set about drafting its Volume One. I would never dare call it ON PEACE. Only a global consensus of Learners assembled in the World Virtual Agora, could begin to compose such a work in a thousand million volumes. Nowadays, there are none.
Even if LEARNERS fits all alone on a virtual library bookshelf under a non-existent call number, its scribe – no matter how pride-scoured –cannot claim copyright to the ideals of peace. Golden peace mentality may lie buried under mountains of weapon mentality dross, but hints of its color glimmer from all our masterworks. Where did LEARNERS’ opulent forbears go? They vanished, replaced by weapon Classics we’ve had to study all our lives.
LEARNERS reconsiders a vital choice we must make
between the mentalities of weapons and peace. Every moment we endure here
on Earth, we connive with this evil or defy it, whether we admit this to
ourselves or not. Today, weapon mentality dominates our thinking without
serious debate. No wonder runaway weapon technologies harvest evermore
victims since everyone submits to weapon mentality without a second
thought. It’s also no wonder that every progressive aspiration must
shudder to a halt in this
Since you begin to grasp LEARNERS’ central premise, you may reject it outright: a common enough gag reflex. “World peace? PeaceWorld? Stop talking. I’m through!” If you value controversy in your mental landscape, ask yourself: “Why dismiss this topic without fair hearing? During my lengthy study of other topics, why didn’t someone sit me down and make me think this through just as thoroughly?”
I’ll tell you why. Emerging from infancy into frustrated adolescence, we mature sexually long before we do so emotionally and socially. Society exploits this offset development. It offers us a predictable life cycle from adolescent rebellion to adult uncertainty and then the mid-life backlash of reactionary senescence.
Like Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha, we may only plumb the depths of harsh asceticism, sensual pleasure, material wealth, self-revulsion and eventually, saintly complacency in our own mediocrity (by default). Forced to surrender our healthy conscience and substitute it with passive-aggressive compromise and adherence at gunpoint to conspiracies of greed, we soothe our heartache in ignorance, apathy, drugs, alcohol, fanaticism, amateur obsession, professional compulsion, insanity, felony and self-destruction. From these escapisms, take your pick.
The reform-idealism of youth is everywhere subverted. Suppressing youthful idealism is a pseudo-skill each of us is called upon to master. Shouldn’t nourishing that creative drive be our first priority?
Do you remember when you were a bright young thing as pure as a glass of water? Do you recall the salvo of insults that met your first, childish inquiries into world peace? No matter to whom you turned – to strangers or beloved, to enlightened teachers or dumb brutes – you ran the same gauntlet of veiled insult, condescension and violence if you persisted.
Think back. “World Peace? End poverty? Feed and care for everyone in perfect equality? Get real, stop dreaming, grow up! What do I have to do, grab you by the shoulders and shake?”
Ok. I’m summarizing years of systematic and very subtle indoctrination in as many lines of text. But you get my point.
Did this ceaseless brainwash while you were young and impressionable—did it bring you up short? Was your conscience battered silent? Did you suspend disbelief to avoid rejection? Did you become enslaved to it regardless of its merit? Would it have mattered what race, nation or creed you sprang from? Were you ever given a choice?
“Crimestop
means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of
any dangerous thought. It includes the
power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of
misunderstanding the simplest arguments that are inimical to [orthodoxy], and
of being bored and repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading
in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in
short, means protective stupidity.”
George Orwell, 1984, the New American Library, Inc.,
See The 1984 Syndrome.
We stopped short because Everyman silenced us whenever we started asking awkward questions. Our culture subverts pacifism and military decadence as obsessively as it controls human waste and waterborne disease. Both are lethal to a primitive society and both are suppressed. We are potty trained, as children, against peace and valid spirituality.
One arises from the other, don’t you think? In the absence of peace, wouldn't valid spirituality suffer? In the midst of war, doesn't spirituality turn into a monstrous caricature of itself sneering at its own hypocrisy? During what we dare call peacetime, is it not just as bad?
Are we ready to say ENOUGH to this grotesque weapon cult? Have we ever been, will we ever be more ready?
As in our worship of weapon religions, it doesn’t matter how much hypocrite mouth-jabber we make about peace. We are just as averse to it as we are to excrement. As a result, we face infinite social contradictions―and zero closure, resolution or clarity.
Sure, I can understand your fear and loathing, but I can’t let that stop me. You and every other Learner, join me instead! We’re grownups now, supposedly immune to childhood blame. Unplug your ears – there, that’s better – and pay attention. LEARNERS retrieves painful questions we let drop when we were kids, with or without our honest consent.
As this Aquarian Age dawns, it’s a sorry state we submit to. Snake oil democracy and chainsaw logic promote arrogant mismanagement. Fate’s idiot smile seems to favor Conspiracies of Greed. Smirking predators gang rape Blind Justice before our disbelieving eyes. They laugh all the way to the bank, congress, pulpit and academy; then come back for sloppy seconds. Over and over, our institutions legitimize the spastic slapstick of killer primates.
Absurd clichés jam our constellation of political metaphors despite their spectacular failure—or hadn’t you noticed? Like nitwit kibitzers gathering around a stalled car, we keep intoning “We’re just gonna need more Love, personal perfection, Christ in this world, Humanism, Science, Submission, Family Values, Free Markets – straighter politicians, fairer bullies and kinder Fat Cats.” In short, some purer dictatorship of fathead vacuity. More widespread and worthless: “Don’t believe in nothin’, little pal, but earning and spending the next buck. Be cool, be a steady fool like us.”
Stupefied by all this barbarism, prophets, newscasters, technocrats and commoners bray disaster in four-part harmony. Others pray that nothing less than swift Apocalypse come deliver them, pretty please. Stupefied by their panic, they worsen the necrosis of this world merely to hasten the Ending they crave.
Thus, we deny the obvious, the Miracle upon which our existence depends a thousand times a day. According to this Miracle, a far greater wisdom awaits us. It could replace typhoons of venom with windfalls of plenty. Fantastic abundance could bloom where wastelands fester, full justice, salve ancient traumas and about-face mutinous legions back into civility.
Imagine it! Cast off your silly panic and start imagining the best that could happen.
Instead, weapon dissidents and weapon reactionaries croak contrapuntal duets of hoary dogma. They obsess over the hated Other and plot His impossible destruction. Others are satisfied with sitting on their hands until everyone becomes an angel, or until Christ returns to deliver us (whichever comes first).
Everything is improvised. No one has any idea what he’s talking about and no one has a workable plan except for more killing—either sit still for it or stir it up worse. No one listens to anyone else; the major perk of being promoted into power is no longer having to listen to anyone, just issue a string of insane orders unmindful of reality—the recipe for guaranteed disaster. Nothing else is tolerated.
We are only permitted two kinds of politicians these days: those who have quashed every good idea for generations (Democrats) and those who never met a nasty idea they didn’t like (Republicans). Like village blacksmiths lusting after a first-glimpsed motorcycle, they long to tease the world apart and reassemble it to suit their fancy. Yet their obsolete political vocabularies won’t let them understand the world’s most basic contradictions and opportunities. They want to fix a 1950 Harley-Davidson with Age of Pericles terminology and horse-and-buggy tools.
Only the absolute justice of our cause keeps it alive—not our necrotic habits of thought and speech. Poisoned by gangrenous ideologies and rejecting them, we’ve grown so credophobic that we refuse to believe in anything any longer. As a result, we’ve lost our last spirit toeholds and fallen into riptides of change.
But do not despair.
Heed Jesse Jackson and “Keep hope alive!” As in two post-war
You might recall some movie where ruthless Evil secures every source of power, control and security. By midway through the story, the Good are dumbfounded. No one knows what to do next.
Then someone, perhaps Ruth, says, “Hold it, I have a plan.” Rather than turn away in despair, passive bystanders start paying miraculous attention. Inspired, they transform themselves into heroes. At that point, for the sake of dramatic continuity, the camera cuts to the triumph of the Good.
This book itemizes the vital steps between ‘no plan’ and ‘plan in action.’ During this critical but no-fun stage, we should discuss our plan in detail, expose its inherent weaknesses, suggest better alternatives and coordinate our timing and chronology. Let daring volunteers take on tasks that fit their special interests and talents. All you reductive meliorists out there, who’ve pounded your steering wheel in stalled cars for the last few thousand years, start your engines! Shake awake all those who’ve abstained from sheer nihilism and cowardice.
I have a plan and here it is, as follows. We are at this essential if boring stage of the process. Let us proceed accordingly and with dispatch, I implore you.
Some warnings before we begin. This book’s eccentric prose, exotic idiom and outlandish speculation will make very hard reading. We’re gonna make warfare illegal across the planet, here—not bake a cake. You’ll find no easy sound bites in these pages, no quick fixes and none of the simplistic TV pabulum we’ve grown accustomed to. You may click BACK, now, if that was all you came here looking for.
Treat LEARNERS as a rough guide clearer than run-on Classics and straighter than Ivy-League obfuscations. After reading it, young prodigals may scout out this locked-down prison world while guards and convicts slumber.
Even handedly, it beckons ecstatic Nobel laureates,
berserkers with nothing left to lose, aimless idealists, madrassa dreamers,
dissatisfied bonzes, Talmud scholars and seminarians, prep-schooled sellouts
and ghetto luminaries defying evils wriggling just beyond their own brown
study. It speaks as much to every
Learner lost in a funhouse mirror-maze of weapons and peace as to my childhood
ghost haunting bygone stacks. I address
these words in equal parts to next year’s
This book outlines what we were driven to discover and
failed to find.
My message is extremely biased. Attacking sly platitudes, its arguments climb way out on shaky limbs—farther than you may wish to follow. You’ll find no ‘detachment’, ‘disinterest’ or ‘balance’ here, as those terms are misused today. Given this topic’s infinite complexity, my writing numbskills and lesser erudition, your work is cut out for you.
What’s more, I’ll turn every rhetorical cannon against the weapon mentors who drilled me on them. Horrified and enraged, I’ll invoke any fallacy more useful than its ‘logically correct’ counterpart. I have no use for proponents of ‘logical analysis’ who dare permit children to starve to death and merely turn their backs when such awkward topics encroach on their meticulously blank spirit. In the same spirit, Learners will revive PeaceWorld by shamelessly appropriating every Madison Avenue fraud and taps bugle call by which we’ve been lulled to sleep up ‘til now.
If the dry logic of world peace is all you seek, read Mortimer Adler’s How to Think about War & Peace,
Simon and
How dare you suggest it’s none of your doing! Quit lying to yourself, here at least. We are all 100% accountable.
Alas, American Weapon Party commissars made sure a
failed haberdasher, Harry Truman, grabbed the reigns of power from
Still today, we waste precious time and talent protesting their mighty warmonger initiatives, pointlessly. Let THEM protest in absolute futility OUR mighty peace initiatives—never again the other way around!
This book is a speculative entertainment and an impassioned rally cry, not some textbook drear. Neither fiction nor non-, it fits in somewhere between confession, screed, and sketchbook of homilies, anecdotes and conjectures. As Margaret Atwood puts it, forecast journalism. There is no other work like it and I can find no political group that would adopt it as its own. Learners will certainly arise as a political party in the future—perhaps after I’m gone, as with Marx, Rousseau and Erasmus.
“So it happens that beyond the
imaginary demarcation line between past and present, the writer still finds
himself eye to eye with the human condition, which he is bound to observe and
understand as best he can, with which he must identify, giving it the strength
of his breath and the warmth of his blood, which he must attempt to turn into
the living texture of the story that he intends to translate for his readers,
in such a way that the result be as beautiful, as simple, and as persuasive as
possible.” Ivo Andrić, Acceptance
Speech for the 1961 Nobel Prize for Literature.
"We consider that the basic
value of the European artist during our greatest eras, from the sculptors of
"If humanity enfolds an eternal truth, it is certainly this tragic hesitation in the man who will be called an artist for centuries hence – facing the creation that he experiences more deeply than anyone, that he admires like no one else can, yet that he alone on Earth wants to destroy underground at the same time."
"So let’s understand this
fully: if genius is a discovery, it is upon this discovery that the
resurrection of the past is based. At
the opening of this speech, I spoke about what a renaissance could be, what the
heritage of a culture could be. A
culture is reborn when men of genius, seeking their own truth, draw from the
depths of centuries everything that formerly resembled this truth, even if they
don’t recognize it." André Malraux, Les Conquérants, (The
Conquerors), Le livre de poche, © Bernard Grasset, 1928, pages 311-13.
Accept those parts of LEARNERS you hearken to, then let something better happen. Dismiss anything you find herein that disconcerts your fancy—as conjecture, hearsay, heresy, what you will.
If this work inspires some new idea in you, let me know. I’d love to filigree new ideas into the next rewrite of this work (with proper attribution, of course). With a little luck, I may get to chronicle the real-world progress of this righteous endeavor … perhaps in future chapters of this samizdat.
Why do the terms ‘utopian’ and ‘idealist’ consign our highest values to the trash heap? When did reactionary chic make it unfashionable to do the utmost good?
We may be clumsy practitioners of peace at first, but the love of good throbs in our veins. No word for this talent exists (kalotropism?), but it will not be denied much longer. Who knows; doing good may become fashionable once again, despite the mightiest efforts of the worst among us, to forbid and ridicule it.
Loudmouthed morality truants feign their sophistication by worsening our weapon neuroses. By rote repetition, they malign ‘do-gooders’ and ‘bleeding hearts’. Hiding their own shameful shortcomings, they confabulate the pig-headed terminology and criminal line-up of reactionary correctness. They’ve built an assembly line of conmen and professional hypocrites who are (literally) politically correct enough to serve as stand-ins for legitimate leaders. Each candidate more unsavory than his predecessors while people of talent and genius are chased from politics and social commentary. Otherwise, they’re gunned down in the street or crucified by the media.
Who ARE these malingerers? Do-badders? Flinty hearts? Perhaps a few stony hearts need a little lubricant bleeding, so that their owners’ flat-lined conscience may re-oxygenate?
After so many tries, why don’t we have the best possible government? And don’t you dare suggest we have the best government already. Be honest with yourself here, if nowhere else. With all our schools, books and teachers, why aren’t there billions of peace mentors out there enriching the abundance that is our due, filling the world with miraculous technologies, sacred wildlife, courtly love and random acts of kindness? Where are superb replacements for young Andy Carnegie, the Roosevelts and Little Flower LaGuardia that the administration of excellence demands? Where have you gone!
If we considered this world one
Hardly anyone can list the great peace mentors. I know I couldn’t. Peace’s foremost practitioners have been unassuming gentlefolk. Female peace practitioners are as under-reported here as they are in general history. Compare this blitzed state of ignorance with our household familiarity with Genghis Khan, Hitler and like masters of mayhem. If peace were our first priority – not mass murder – this Learner deficit would cause us grave concern. Nothing of the kind concerns us, for we are first and foremost weapon slaves.
LEARNERS may make you dizzy at first, its range of topics is so kaleidoscopic. We never studied them in the depth they deserved. Of necessity, our first review will be insolently superficial and subject to mythical denial at every page-turn. Once this crisis is past, we may render full justice to these exotic notions.
Read the first few chapters of LEARNERS to take in its vocabulary: (“Intro & Vocab” to “Stop”). Thereafter, resume your random perusal in any of its three Sections:
Section I) Why we’re in this mess;
Section II) How we approach PeaceWorld; and
Section III) What results we may expect.
The first and harshest Section, Why, stretches midway through LEARNERS. Why is so incendiary, its first-time readers risk burnout. Unlike more soothing texts, this one won’t overlook great evils we’ve been taught to regret briefly and then take for granted. This merciless inventory of error will seem wearisome at first, mind-numbing later and then unbearable. Your subconscious will revisit every aversion therapy you suffered as a child, to get you to quit. You’ll grow frustrated with this reading, then be nauseated by it and finally enraged. You’ll have to brace yourself sternly to chugalug this bitter brew to its dregs. Take tiny sips of this sour mash and find more syrupy refreshment elsewhere, perhaps at the nipple of TV.
Just don’t give up. I might have entitled Why, How and What—Lamentation, Transition and Hope.
Bittersweet How lists unfortunate tendencies and proposes some countermeasures. Sweeter What sketches peaceful alternatives to the weapon technologies we submit to today—assuming global majorities grasp Why and How beforehand.
This book is intended for every Learner to come. Its discontent should have been and was our patrimony—forgotten since. I leave the Sections Who, When and Where to you, beloved Learners. If you catch me fumbling my extraordinary mandate, that’s your cue to take up the burden of my proof.
Recently, I may have found a relaxed way to gatecrash heaven, merely by reincarnating into Jesus Christ’s lifeline the next time I die. I believe this painful redemption is open to all of us, no matter how heavy our Karmic burden. I repeat myself to emphasize this crucial idea.
This exotic doctrine may shut down fundamentalists’
idiotic diktat once and for all. Its universal acceptance would eject all
those fundamentalist middlemen (unworthy of the task) from spiritual
discourse. By what right, superior
wisdom or benediction do they claim to butt in there, anyway? It would put the
Once you grasp this idea, no pompous bigot can lecture, weasel or torture it out of you ever again. You will be completely free to save your soul, miraculously free. Or you may return to these endless lives as often as you wish, as a Bodhisattva—provided this lesson awaits you here the next time you come around, and hasn’t been silenced by Godless fundamentalists and indifferent people, as it has been so many times in the past.
We may serve God or Mammon but not both at once. LEARNERS suggests how to serve this world gracefully and Grace in the next. If you dismiss the above-stated as worthless, Bible-thumping crankdom (more fundamentalist babble), you missed my point entirely. And, my friend, that is your loss. Check out the “reincarnating” link above, and see for yourself.
If you take your weapons indoctrination too seriously, you may expect to sort religion from government as independent variables. Forget it. We are progressives insofar our faith (in whatever) induces fearless love in us, and reactionaries when we react (faithlessly) against the shadows of our fear and hatred. Our creeds and governments are one and the same. It doesn’t matter what phony drapes we use to cover the religious underpinning of government, the same way prudish Victorians used to drape the legs of their piano.
These assertions may sound like pure arrogance to you. I assure you, they’re as carefully thought out as any you’ll find in LEARNERS. It’s up to you to discuss them once and for all.
One of Christ’s parables (the Parable of the Talents: Matthew 25-14) entrusts each of us, his servants, with risk-taking coinage. The Lord intends us to manage our lives for the profit of our souls, not for mere risk-reduction. As stunt people in this universal action movie, we’re here to take enormous risks. Safe mediocrity must be illusory since everything kills us in the end. In our mortality reside our glory and salvation.
I’m surprised how little this epiphany alters what I must say in LEARNERS. Even more surprising will be the grand exploits Learners accomplish once they claim grace in this world and Grace in the next.
At most, these meditations have turned my fortune or failure on this material plane, into the blinding glare one gets off wavelets during sun-dappled late afternoons. They are transient and annoying at worst, beautiful despite their ache and soon to fade.
I’ve given up on free advice to “Live each day as if it were your first and last.” How hormonally unworkable. I look forward to each day’s end, now. My sorriest sleeping dream has turned out to be more interesting than the most spectacular and moving epic I’ve ever read or watched on the screen. I suspect that the after-death experience, properly negotiated, is at least that much better than life. Good music, good lovin’ and a few good friends, plus some other tricks (like laughter and good meals) during this lifetime, they’re something else; they make the pain of living bearable. I counsel no one to abandon them prematurely, no matter what fate our souls may have in store. It seems obvious that we have something important to learn, here and now.
I had no choice but to write and rewrite – en deux langues – this book, this whole book and nothing but this book. In the end, I can only justify my cosmic presumption by pointing out the boundless depths of our moral bankruptcy … and of our craving for Peace.
LEARNERS: On the
Move from WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld
CONTACT PAGE (under development)