Say it plain, the human name, doesn't mean SHIT to a tree. Grace Slick

Abe M Frankel (who began Circle of the EarthTM)

If this is evolution in progress, we have a long, long way to evolve before our societal collective consciousness--and what passes for our personal identities and behavior--catches up to the true intelligence of our minds.

I asked John Kennedy a question at a press conference in the summer of 1960. I don't know what the question was but I'm sure he answered with vigor, clarity and forthrightness. Teddy was there, just a kid then, running around with a bunch of cameras around his neck. Then Gordie and I went out for a beer with Larry O'Brien.

Kennedy won in the Fall, and I felt confident of the part I had played in shaping this energy. Then they–that ubiquitous, all encompassing "they"–killed him and I began to learn that there are larger forces working here that we humans know little about.

But that's O.K. Here's how to be psychic: Think of, imagine, this country (the world) to be one gigantic brain, a single mind, which I call the Collective Societal Consciousness. And this Consciousness changes over time. Now "see" the energy right now. Now "see" the energy in 1960. Lots and lots of young people had sent their souls into JFK and, when he was no more, that energy, traveling itself in a new suit, sent them to Berkeley, California.

When I was twelve or ten, my parents put me on the train in Cincinnati–few planes then–to visit some relatives in Chicago. It was the first time I left home on my own. I walked down the aisle of the coach car looking for a seat. Finally I came to an empty one and I said to the elderly man next to the train's window, "Is this seat taken?" He said, "Are you going to be a good boy?" I said "Yes," as resentfully as I could.

It turned out thus. The questioning one was the ex-Governor of Ohio, Myers Cooper, who was on his way to Iowa to Herbert Hoover's 80th birthday party. We had a good talk, I remember–and I learned something: that in this lifetime of mine I was intended to encounter in various ways many interesting and/or important people. For example, I went to the current Governor of Oregon's Inaugural Ball, and through circumstances just as unlikely as my meet-up with Cooper, I met and danced at the Ball with the Governor's daughter. Which again, I feel at least, had a role in determining the energy and thus the success of his first term and his re-election. Dancing can be a transformation as well as a celebration.

But these kinds of thoughts are not uncommon to me. For example, again, this is from one of my books:

A few years ago, I was at a Cincinnati Reds ball game in late April. I was sitting in the 11 th row just behind the Red's batting circle. Junior Griffey was taking his warmup swings. Junior was in his second year after his trade from Seattle and was in a horrible slump. Had only one or two homers for the year. I watched his swing and then yelled out sing-songy-like: "Junyah, Junyah! Git in your groove Junyah!" When he got up to the plate, he watched the first two pitches and then lined the third pitch over the wall. Then he hit a second home run in that game.

What had I done? What did I do? I saw by his swing that he had forgotten "who he was." And, when I said that to him, he remembered – and knew once again. It was a coming together of energy for an instant moment in time.

It wasn't as though I knew or wanted to associate on a regular or familiar basis with any of these people. Rather, we came in contact for some reason that was needed or beneficial to both of us, and then we were gone, back to the separate life-stories we were in the process living out.

I grew up believing in the American political process. Lima, Ohio was the site of the first oil boom in the east and, in the 1890s, my grandfather went up there and opened a saloon. He also promoted prize fights and was the head of what might be called Lima's Democratic party. My father, Herb, was named after Herbert Campbell who published the Lima newspaper. My father was always a staunch Democrat which was not the normal way in Republican, home of the Tafts and House UnAmerican Activities Committee Chairman Gordon Shear, 1950s Cincinnati. In fact, in Cincinnati, in the 1950s, there was no Democratic party. There were only the Republicans and the more liberally-minded Charterites. Like Charles Taft who later became the Governor as a Republican. In one councilmanic election, when McCarthyism was real popular, the Republican party of Cincinnati ran a full page ad in the Cincinnati Enquirer accusing the Charterites of "socialist" connections.

But my father had been taught by his father and his mother, Rachael, to be a Democrat, to associate with the common people. And I grew up believing in the American political process because it was a part of the history of my family. I grew up hearing, and believing, my father's family stories. My heroes were simple: Jefferson, Lincoln, Twain. Solid American guys.

And yet, while my childhood created a familial allegiance to the history and current reenacting of our form of government, another part of me knew I never fit-in in Cincinnati. When my father died, his obituary was on the front page of the morning newspaper which, I would say, was not usual for someone who's job description was "Orthodontist." I was never one to adapt as my father had done to become a big success there. Like he had. No, I didn't really care what people in Cincinnati thought of me. So, I began feeling this split. And, in 1964, I followed the others of my generation and went to Berkeley, California. Where all of us, who thought the American Political Process did not work and needed to be replaced, got together.

Many of you know what the ‘60s was about–our media caretakers now portray it as being solely about the Vietnam War and Civil Rights. For many of us young people who went to that place, we were going to change the world. (Movies: "Berkeley in the 60s". director Mark Kitchell"; "Summer of Love") But that didn't come about as we dreamt it would. And we did manage to bring on some energies that our country, and the world, must deal with now. We revolted against the now unimaginable constraints and rules of the 1950s and the nuclear family, but we too made way for a new and now totally unfettered individual freedom to do whatever one pleases. Which, since most of us don't have the self-knowledge or depth of experience to make ourselves up, became a new conformity: provided by television marketers and programming-decisionists, mass movie dumb-‘em-downers and the conglomerate holders and consumption-addict-makers who own them.

And here we are! Oh, by the way, did I say that the folks in Cincinnati re-christened their Cross County Highway. So as not to forget his political legacy, their always welcoming, time-shrinking corridor of cement and human semi-permanency now immortalizes "President Ronnie."

The New Artist by Victor Greentree

The fine folks at "60 Minutes" tell us that we junk "130,000 computers a day" in America. Our always evolving and gettin' better technology makes them obsolete–which is about when they also stop working and it's cheaper to buy a new one. Most of these are shipped to China illegally where the precious, but highly toxic, heavy metals are salvaged by workers low on the totem pole of employment, in obscure villages, causing epidemic cancer towns and fish-less rivers.

Meanwhile, people on all sides of the argument have begun to panic. So, for the first time, we find a big push for the new technologies that will save us. Everything is green, green, green! Alternative, life-loving energies, family planning in the 3rd world, cars that run on no fuel at all, every hill covered in wind mills, and that unnecessary, barren desert waste of the west totally filled-in neatly with shinny, metal erector sets of solar production.

Where is the voice saying: our whole system of values and culture is wrong? That is what needs to be changed. Where is the voice saying our theory of economics that demands constant growth is nuts, insane? Where is the voice saying the center of our culture–U.S., Asia, Europe–is consumption and we need an entirely different set of values to survive. Where is the voice asking: has our present set of values made us happy, complete, physically and mentally well? No, of course not. We all, deep in ourselves, know what a screwed-up mess we‘ve made with our lives. Of the world. And yet, bless the idiots in charge; they are locked into the system. They can't change. And so, we head into yet one more round of advancement that is "business as usual." But, bless us, that's how we got here in the first place folks.

Of course, the answer is really simple. And, what's best, it is so cheap we could say it's free. We need to be a lot poorer. And all those people out there who have way, way, way too much money need to join in. We all need to stop spending and buying a lot of useless crap we don't need! We all need to turn off that constant commercial that we call television.

How about: a guaranteed minimum income for all citizens. Isn't that great! No more worries about unemployment. Instead of giving 2 or 3 trillion to companies that aren't competitive and, according to capitalist economics and our American system of "free enterprise," should fail, structure a minimum income for everybody. And let them save the companies, the good companies, the right companies, by purchasing the items they need and want. Disconnect "employment" from "production." There is really no logic for the amount we produce being connected to the need to employ.

We don't need economy stimulus packages–so people spend more. We need a society of real human values and better, more intelligent people–who have the smarts not to be manipulated, who don't eat-up all this commercial hooey they're being fed every hour of every day.

Or the joiners who swarm enmasse to the equally dangerous religious, intellectually shallow and divisive, warfare. They are still fighting the crusades in the "Holy Land"--and they've only been doing it for two thousand years! We need to get rid of this–because, although economic depression is hardship, we can survive that. But all this crap about who's god is right, because it says so in these books that are so old that even their own experts disagree on what they mean, will be the end of us and perhaps the end of all life on this planet.

Besides, unfortunately, they don't even have the story right. The story is that WE ARE ALL ONE. And, therefore, underneath the surface of this idiotic squabbling, there is only one religion. And, if you don't know that, you are feeding at the wrong god/dess trough.

So, Christians, Moslems, Jews, your religions are out-dated. Obsolete. They don't belong here anymore. They are part of a bygone era–not the new era of one planet. Of the coming era.

THERE IS ONLY ONE RELIGION, AND THAT IS NO RELIGION. WE ARE ALL ONE.

*****

When I was young myself I read James Joyce's "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man"--who didn't then. I came to the part where James lays out the life travel route he wants for himself:

"Mother is putting my new secondhand clothes in order. She prays now, she says, that I may learn in my own life and away from home and friends what the heart is and what it feels. Amen. So be it. Welcome, 0 life, I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race."

As my eyes and then my brain absorbed those black letters into their own private code, I did what any normal boy or girl would do. I jumped for joy and said "That's for me." Who would not love to make such a life's journey? Then, a few years later, I happened to be a student of writer Kay Boyle who had, in the 1920s, hung out with .Joyce in Paris during that great age of artist expatriation. Kay, like me, grew up in Cincinnati; my dog, Walter, used to sleep under her desk, by her feet, during that unhurried class time at San Francisco State. And Miss Boyle, as we called her, who had been married a number of times, including to some Count or other, always mistakenly called me "Robert" which, I learned, had been the name of her one true love, Robert McAlmon. Thus, in my predetermined thinking, that was all the confirmation needed for me to continue as I was headed.

But even before this, I had discovered that I was different from the other children. Like Nabakov's New England hero, "My picture book was at an early age the painted parchment papering our cage." I was a don't-fit-in-nik. I sucked my thumb. I prefered to be alone by the creek at the end of our street. Then I got older and I could never hold a regular job very long. That did not bother me. I always had a small amount of money that my grandfather had left me, so I didn't have to. And regular jobs, or life-long careers as doctors or money accumulators or politicians or public officials or creators of things or human providers, although I could admire the dedication of many of these when they performed a service for others, did not interest me. I was interested in bigger games, the big picture, higher stakes. I wanted to get to the heart of the matter. Crack the big nut. Find out what was inside it and spit it out for others to see.

I came to think that I was here for a special reason. And, no matter how many ice cream cones I ate, or how many gorgeous women I mutually, pleasurably had sex with, or how many primitive forests, desert caves or mountain meadows I sat in, I was about to give it my best shot. I was going to do whatever I possibly could, for as long as I could, to change, in a basic way, how the human species lives on this planet. For things were, are, not right here. We all still had the same warring-tribes mentality we began with thousands of years ago. We, through scientific-mind-advances in ourselves, had lost our original inate ability to see the Earth as a sacred place--including all of its creatures, plants, sky and rocks, and each other. In short, I didn't fit in because I could still "make contact." And, yes, "making contact" is the change I want to make in all of you.

*****

"The artist of the future isn't going to paint pictures or dance or sing or write poetry or music primarily. He/she will be a wizard, a magician, a shaman who will use any and all media to transform the consciousness of this planet." *****

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