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Spirit Wisdom II: The Enlightened Warrior's
Guide to Personal and Cultural Transformation

For seven years The Alexander Journal, a bimonthly newsletter, offered readers Alexander's wisdom and insight into a wide range of topics. Spirit Wisdom II offers the best of the Journal's final years; but even better, the original essays have been newly reviewed, edited, and expanded by Alexander for this volume.

Topics include: music, healing, dreams, ghosts, a "tour" of the spiritual realm, the spirituality of animals, the Beatles, and astrology, among others.

In addition, Alexander offers new essays on subjects of timely concern, including global warming, terrorism, and polarized politics. Weaving these themes into a critique of the American Empire, and civilization itself, Alexander points the way to a future society rooted in principles of nature and spirit.

Order tree-book or e-book.

Playing the Human Instrument: Music for Pleasure and Healing

Music holds tremendous power to affect the body and its energy fields, and that particular keys and chords directly stimulate discrete areas of the body and fields. Let us gaze into our crystal ball and offer some hints of how music might be incorporated into the "gentle medicine" of the future.

First, the human body can be vibrationally "mapped." Healthy or diseased, each organ, each muscle, each blood cell, offers a distinct vibrational pattern. We envision a chamber lined with sensors, in which a patient lies while the sensors read the body's vibrational patterns. The sensors' data would provide a complete map of the body's vibrational matrix, with which healers could readily pinpoint any areas of disharmony. Particularly noticeable would be tumors or other growths emitting discordant turbulence. Indeed, since a tumor is always "invited" to a given site by preexisting discordance, the presence of such a discordant field would offer warning of incipient tumors even before they manifest. Application of musical tones entraining with the affected portion of the body could heal the incipient tumor before it grows.

The Unquiet Dead: Visitations from Beyond the Veil

The world's mythology and literature are haunted by spectral visitors from "the other side," ectoplasmic intruders aiding, warning, guiding, and terrorizing humankind. Every culture, from the aboriginal to the wired, spins tales of vaporous apparitions, of a constant commerce across the permeable boundary dividing souls freed of flesh from those still encased within it. If death silences the lips, whence arises the ceaseless clamor from beyond the veil?

Oftentimes possession is a mutually staged psychodrama in which the host liberates himself to express thoughts and feelings considered taboo within his family or culture. With all impulses toward such behavior blocked by convention, the host's psychological chaos may "invite" an astral entity looking for an earthly outlet. Together they stage a drama in which the host seems to relinquish all control over speech and behavior while the "evil" spirit takes over. Vulgar language, fascination with sexual and excretory functions, and religious blasphemy are all released in a torrent of long-suppressed energies suddenly liberated. The family is shocked and scandalized, of course, secretly delighting the host. The astral entity's energy amplifies the host's, resulting in superhuman strength, knowledge, or abilities the host alone does not possess.

Into the Dreamtime: The Soul's Nightly Journey

Every culture, from aboriginal tribe to complex civilization, recognizes the significance and esoteric mystery of dreams. History, literature, and poetry swarm with dreams' prophetic and symbolic power. Modern western thought, its vision narrowed by the blinders of materialism, struggles to make sense of dreams. In one view, the purpose of sleep is to allow the body time to rest and heal, with dreaming a mysterious byproduct. Dreams are variously explained as the random static of neurological chaos; a means of emotionally processing the day's events; or the symbolic patina on material rising from the deeper strata of the psyche. Whatever one's view, all agree that the realm of sleep and dreaming remains a dark mystery.

The realm of sleep and dreams is the native state of consciousness, and operates according to natural principles, whereas the illusion of physical reality is a self-generated hallucination which can be sustained for only so long before consciousness must seek relief from operating in such an unnatural state.

From Scalpel to Song: The Future of Healing

In deepest terms, the body's blueprint lies outside the physical system. Every living being, plant or animal, springs from a nonphysical blueprint which pulses in and out of physical existence. Your senses cannot perceive this near-instantaneous blinking "on" and "off"; your mind leaps the gaps of "nonexistence" and paints a sturdy picture of endurance and stability.

This blueprint is not simply a mirror image of the body, for it contains every potential form the body assumes from conception through old age. The blueprint is a bank of probabilities, then, which will be sequentially actualized and thrust into physical manifestation in accordance with the rhythms dictated by a species's developmental template and each being's private purpose. The blueprint can thus be thought of as a "master body," from which each moment of a body's growth springs in exquisitely detailed and precise form.

The Warming Earth: Global Crisis and Restoration

Yours is an era of globalization, when national boundaries crumble as people, products, and pollution crisscross the globe. So brilliant has humankind been at taming and conquering the wild Earth—bulldozing the natural world in service to human need—that the planet could well be renamed Humanity. A smug complacency would be premature, however, as humanity's triumph is not yet fully realized. Only now—with the advent of scientific instruments capable of measuring the changes, and the further advent of communication technologies linking the globe in borderless networks—are you beginning to glimpse the gravity of the crisis you have created.

For, in the end, yours is not planet Humanity and you cannot plunder it without consequence. Every ecological system, from a tiny pond to a planet, draws upon redundancies and reserves to weather periods of stress and restore equilibrium. This means that as an ecological system begins to suffer damage, the damage will not be apparent because compensatory mechanisms mask it. There comes a point, however—a tipping point—when redundancies and reserves have been exhausted and the system begins to unravel in a downward spiral of collapse.

Global warming, then, is not a single process, with a single cause, a single consequence, and a single cure. It is the most obvious manifestation of an unraveling global ecology with many causes and many consequences; the blaring siren drawing attention to a planet that has exhausted itself trying to compensate for the predations of humankind. It is also not the most dire potential outcome of an unraveling ecology; it is a precursor of worse to come if its lessons are not heeded.

Rage and Madness: The Roots of Terrorism

Because civilization is unnatural, nothing about it is perpetually self-regenerating: civilized societies decline and fall with clockwork regularity; leaders win and lose power by ballot or bullet; nations are swallowed by larger nations; economies buckle and heave; new gods arise and are forgotten; jobs, houses, and fortunes are won and lost; the very foundation of life is a gnawing, unquenchable insecurity. Appease it as you might with trinkets of security—power, wealth, land, fame—you can never quench that insecurity; it forever festers and burns.

Islamic terrorism is an oxymoron. Nothing in the Koran justifies the deliberate and wanton murder of innocents, nothing. While the Koran doesn't share Christ's message of "turning the other cheek"—a value no "Christian" nation has ever followed—it urges restraint in warfare and equable relations with other faiths. As terrorism fails the test of any religious justification, we must look elsewhere for the real motive behind so-called "Islamic" terrorism.

Ultimately, terrorism is born of impotence. It is a furious lashing out of those bereft of power and influence, striking out against those they view as depriving them of their due. The suicide bomber strapping explosives to his chest and destroying himself and bystanders is deluding himself if he thinks his death means anything but the ultimate self-abnegation of the impotent. His act violates the Koran; the slaughter of innocents offends Allah; he only strengthens the state he despises.

Projection and Polarity: The Psychology of Politics

In civilized society, the central task is always the quenching of fear, the search for security. So the political spectrum, as you know it, represents a range of reactions to fear, to forging security amidst insecurity. However obscured that central problem may be beneath the complexities of modern society, it ever suffuses the political conversation.

The entire political spectrum, from "left" to "right," addresses existential fear and insecurity. What do those gradations mean, then? And why would a given individual gravitate toward one pole or the other? Why do most people rest comfortably in the middle? Here is where individualized psychology comes into play.

"Liberal" and "conservative" are permanent psychological types—templates in the pool of human consciousness—which, in every age, assume characteristic positions on social issues. A liberal of two centuries ago, if his values remained unchanged, would be a fulminating reactionary today. A conservative of today, transplanted two centuries back, would be a ranting radical of that age. The psychological types are eternal; the issues they embrace ephemeral.

From a societal perspective, the conservative approach is more natural. It is natural, when faced with insecurity, to hunker down in a rigid, top-down hierarchy with those at the top barking orders and everyone else bowing and scraping. This is the most natural and efficient way to ensure social stability—it works, as history shows.

But from a psychological perspective, the progressive philosophy is more natural. It is natural—because you are tribal creatures and tribes are equitable and communitarian—to wish that all be fed, clothed, housed, and educated. It is natural to expand the circle of affiliation to embrace all members of the human family.

Thus your conundrum. The poles of the political spectrum rest on natural and unnatural elements. On the psychological:societal matrix, conservatives are unnatural:natural and progressives are natural:unnatural. Perhaps this is why neither side, when in power, produces universally satisfactory results. It is an insoluble conundrum for it arises from civilization's being an unnatural social order. Any attempt at social organization, conservative or progressive, will have inefficiencies, repressions, unfairness, disparity, instability, and will ultimately fail: for what is unnatural cannot endure.