I finished reading Illium by Dan Simmons the other day.  Good book.  If you like soft science fiction and Greek mythology, you'll love it.  Achilles is an arrogant bad ass in it, but I've always prefered Hector.  Hector seems more like a good guy to me, Achilles like the indestructable brat.

I'm now reading People from the Other World by Henry S. Olcott (an enthusiastic theosophist).  First published in 1875, my copy was published in 1972.  I love old books.  The smell is such a comfort.

I am not saying that I believe in the spiritualist movement of the 19th century.  I think a large portion of it was the work of illusionists trying to turn a buck.  I do think every holy man is a con man to a certain degree.  Simply a necessity in dealing with the uninitiated.

Never the less, the book did get me thinking about spirituality in the United States and similar governments.  The book details some of the treatment and torture of mediums and psychic of the 1800s.  I was raised with a pretty traditional Ihanktawan belief system.  My grandmother and her siblings, my whole family (there was no differentiating between immediate and extended family), in our way of life it was normal to see and speak with spirits on a daily basis.  We weren't afraid of most spirits.  We gave them their space and respected them like any part of nature.

Like in the book, the spiritual ways of the Native American (I prefer the term American Indian) were beat and tortured out of them.  People today have been conditioned to no longer experience the spiritual nature of life.  Science is a jealous god.  People seem encouraged to riducule those who believe in psychic, and spirits, and the supernatural.  Are minds have been conditioned to be blind to the spirits.  The root of this being the materialism of culture.  Materialistic culture spread like an illness.  A spiritual illness.

Any ways, I went to a Pastors For Peace gathering this evening.  They caravan to Cuba every year as an act of civil disobedience in an attempt to end the United States trade blockade against Cuba.  Check it out, it's a worthy cause.

www.pastorforpeace.org

Fraternally,
St. N.