States' rights redivivus?

"Redivivus" is a Latin word meaning revived or reborn, generally used to show the writer's deep learning. I had to look it up to make sure I was spelling it right (I wasn't).

When I was a kid, with only a superficial interest in politics, I gathered that "states' rights" were something you wouldn't bring in the house, a slogan of southern rednecks who hadn't been reconciled to outlawing slavery. Nothing I read had a kind word to say for the concept.

Maybe states' rights were a Bad Thing back then, or being promoted for wrong purposes. Lately, however, I've come to see the concept in a very different light, as I've been forced to recognize the incredible wisdom of the Constitution's plain statement that all powers not specifically enumerated as belonging to the federal government belonged to the states and the people.

It's been especially obvious since the federal government, including the president, a large percentage of the Congress, and the judiciary have decided on our behalf that a mass migration of unlettered, impoverished, and non-English-speaking Third Worlders is just what the United States needs.

Having observed at close hand some of the less savory results of the invasion, and it being abundantly evident that much more of the same was in store unless countermeasures were taken, states and localities have begun to do the job that Americans in the federal government won't do. The Kansas City Star reports:

Citing an “unnatural influx” of illegal immigrants, [Missouri] Gov. Matt Blunt on Monday ordered state troopers to start checking the immigration status of every person they arrest. …

The federal government has failed to act to curtail illegal immigration, and it’s time for Missouri to do something, he said.

(Tip of the hat: Mike Tuggle at Rebellion.)

Machiavelli, I believe, said that diseases in government are like diseases in the body: hard to discover while they are still curable, and after they become evident, hard to cure. The disease that has taken hold of our federal government is by now entirely visible. I am coming more and more to think that only local governments, still relatively subject to the will of the people, offer much chance of a cure.

States' rights redivivus? Bring 'em on.

Iceland out of the northern hemisphere now!

Uncyclopedia ("the content-free encyclopedia that anyone can edit"), an uncouth, grotesque, ridiculous, and very funny parody of Wikipedia, can tell you more than you want to know about things you didn't even know you didn't know about.

Want to reach a new level of understanding about Hitler's Ex-Girlfriends, Failure, Licensed Spellers, Famous Druids, Apathy, US Elected State-Level Executives Who Have Not Been Human, and much, much less? This is the site for you!

Oh, yes. Iceland.

"Anti-Icelandic sentiment is opposition or hostility toward the government, culture, or people of Iceland. Anti-Islandic sentiment is found in every country including Iceland itself."

"Iceland is known for being the biggest tourist trap in the world and more boring then watching a flower die of old age."

"Anti-Icelandic sentiments are not to be confused with Anti-Islandic condiments, although the two things are related. Anti-Icelandic condiments are condiments that are called 'diametrically opposed to everything Iceland stands for' by Icelandic ultranationalists, who advice that 'true Icelanders don't eat mayonnaise or mustard'."

Now you will not be surprised if you see this …

Flag burning is a common manifestation
of anti-Icelandic sentiment.

"We are going to get hit again"

That's the headline of an interview in Newsweek with Vice Admiral (ret.) John Scott Redd, who heads the government’s National Counterterrorism Center. I must admit I can't keep straight all the various security agencies this country relies on to help us stay in the land of the living, but I presume the top banana at an organization with this title must be in the loop. Admiral Redd says:

We’ve got this intelligence threat; we’re pretty certain we know what’s going on. We don’t have all the tactical details about it, [but] in some ways it’s not unlike the U.K. aviation threat last year. So we know there is a threat out there. The question is, what do we do about it?

He then answers his question:

And the response was, we stood up an interagency task force under NCTC leadership. So you have all the players you would expect: FBI, CIA, DHS, DIA, DoD, the operators—the military side comes into that—participating in an integrated plan, but integrated in a much more granular and tactical way than we’ve ever done before.

I don't know what a granular plan is, but I know a task force when I see one. That all these alphabet agencies are trying to play from the same score is good, but is it really the most effective way to protect the country?

The interview suggests the assumptions behind the government's counterterror activities. The main assumption is that the terrorist threat comes from one gang, Al-Qaeda, and that nothing can be done to stop them coming into the United States unless there is proof that will stand up in a law court.

I will give you good odds that when we are "hit again," as Admiral Redd is convinced will happen, the participants in the plot will turn out to have no evident connection with Al-Qaeda. They will be "regular guys" like the perpetrators of 7/7 in London. They'll have baseball teams they root for, good driving records, no criminal background.

It's worth noting that the last two intended terrorist plots that were prevented (Fort Dix, JFK) were stopped because of a snitch and a tip-off, respectively. Fine. We need all the help we can get, and the police and security agencies involved are entitled to take a bow for exemplary action using the sources they had.

The fact remains that there is no way to guarantee public safety against terrorists — all you can do is improve the odds. And the odds would be significantly improved if the terrorists never got into the United States at all.

There's no way to guarantee that, either, but there's something that would be a giant step forward. I'm sure you see where this is leading. We should stop Muslim immigration. Period. And check out very thoroughly any visitor from a Muslim country or a country with a large Muslim population, or who has an Arabic name, or who for any other reason arouses suspicion. That is feasible. Infiltrating every sleeper cell isn't.

Of course, it's drastic. Of course, it will inconvenience many innocent people. But nobody has a right to immigrate here, so would-be Muslim immigrants have no legitimate complaint. And if someone doesn't want to put up with questioning about why they are visiting, for how long, where they're going, and whatever else we want to ask them, they don't have to come here.

Naturally the ACLU and its acolytes will go off their heads. Discriminatory! Well, yes. That's the point. We're not up against a gang called Al-Qaeda, as though they were the Mafia or drug smugglers. We are, as the admiral admits, in a war. One with, as he puts it delicately, "a strong ideological content." Which is as close as he can come to saying out loud that Islam is a totalitarian system with a top layer of religion, and it's coming to get us.

Most Muslims aren't terrorists, but terrorists can easily pass for "moderate" Muslims. The next "hit" is being planned at this moment, and the planners will be trying for a grand slam. It's a point of honor for these blokes to raise the score each time.

Admiral Redd says, "We have come a long way. But these guys are smart. They are determined. They are patient. So over time we are going to lose a battle or two. We are going to get hit again, you know, but you’ve got to have the stick-to-itiveness or persistence to outlast it." Sorry, sir, but that's not good enough. I don't want to outlast an enemy that would like to take the lives of thousands or tens of thousands of us. I want to make it as close to impossible for them to succeed as we can. And it will be a lot harder for them to succeed if they're not here.

Advice to Indian cattle: Smile, look natural

"Indian cattle have to show police their photo ID cards"
— Headline, Toronto Star




Hair: Brown; Eyes: Brown; Height: 6'1"
Weight: 1,377 lb.
Religion: Declines to answer
Status: Sacred (India); Non-sacred (outside India)
Member since: 2007

But what if they insist on wearing the niqab when photographed?

Invitation to a mosqued ball

Lambeaters, the famous guards at the Tower of Londonistan, pose for tourist photos.

Steve, a commenter to a recent entry here, suggested that I was "obviously afraid of something called 'Islamization of Europe', a artificially installed fear by all the right wingers and Anti-EU guys all over Europe. Please, relax as there is nothing like 'Islamization' in the EU."

I was glad to hear it. I had been worried there for a few minutes.

Steve, please reassure Daniel Johnson as well. We need to scupper this artificially induced fear before more people start believing it.

Tragically hip

The past isn't always another country. Sometimes it hangs around, living on spare change and turning in bottles for deposit refunds, and they don't do things differently there. They just do the same repeatedly, like the spook in a haunted house who poses on the staircase again night after night.

Gerard van der Leun at American Digest went to a latter-day counterculture event in the park, and came back with photos of species some of us thought were extinct, like the rediscovery of the coelacanth.

I gotta be me

Flashing, man! Am I drowning or having some other kind of near-death experience and undergoing a life review? I'm in Berkeley, 1968. Smoke gets in my eyes. I've been to more of these festivals than a reindeer has had hot dinners.

I've said before, and I'll no doubt say again (because I have only a limited store of ideas, and don't want to use them up too quickly) that there were good things about the '60s counterculture. The music, a lot of it. The un-ironic romanticism. The skepticism about technology. The — well, I don't want to get too personal.

So in that respect, I guess I'm different to most of today's cultural conservatives. But almost all of what was good about the '60s counterculture washed out, especially after it became politicized, and everything that was toxic survived and evolved into the political correctness of the Baby Boomer generation, or what I think of as the National Public Radio generation.

What seems to me saddest about van der Leun's photos isn't the woman shown above who's doing the hippie hippie shake without quite having the … style to go with it. The distressing bit is the younger people, in the age group I was in as a Berkeley freak. Whatever you say about the original hippies (a tag we had contempt for: we called each other heads or freaks), you have to admit that they created a genuinely new subculture, including art forms like the psychedelic-inspired Fillmore posters, clothing, slang.

These poor kids (poor in imagination; I expect few are financially poor, which some of the original counterculture kids made it a point of honor to be) who think they're so cool, so out there, so dangerous, have invented sod-all. The only thing they seem to know how to do is copy what we did 40 years ago, with the possible exception of the tattoos and metal studs.

I think young people should have a culturally rebellious streak. (So should older people, for that matter.) We need to have our cage rattled from time to time. But these Haight-Ashbury re-enacters aren't introducing anything. They're just playing at being part of what they imagine was a Golden Age of transgressiveness, and thanking themselves for their daring.

A few years ago, before Time magazine went into terminal irrelevance, it ran a thoughtful story about how the hip icons, from the Beat Generation to the bikers to James Dean to Jim Morrison, had been co-opted into the standard off-the-shelf popular culture. The headline asked something like, "If Everybody's Hip, Is Anybody Hip?"

A good question. One thing I'll take my oath on: these young people channeling the stoned dropouts who created their template aren't hip. They've turned on, but they've tuned in to their parents. Some rebels.

But I would not give you false hope
On this strange and mournful day
When the mother and child reunion
Is only a motion away
— Simon and Garfunkel

A terrible beauty is born

Striking modern art.

Love those blues.


Like a heavenly flower.


Museum quality.

If you happen to be an oncologist, you know what I'm going to say next. Yes, these gorgeous items are cancer cells. From top to bottom, breast cancer; unspecified; unspecified; brain cancer.

I've read that even amid the horrors of war, soldiers have sometimes found beauty to admire: tracer bullets and phosphorus like fireworks, smoke billowing from an explosion. It would seem that nature likes to tease us by making some of its worst phenomena pleasing to the eye. There might be a philosophical lesson in this, but if so, don't ask me what.

Here is a satellite photo of Hurricane Dean:

UPDATE 9/2: Speaking of visual beauty in weapons of war, I ran across the following description in Elizabeth Bowen's The Heat of the Day. It's a nighttime air raid in World War II London (Bowen had lived there throughout the war):

Harrison, back again, stood in the middle of a street, otherwise empty, illuminated by a chandelier flare. During the pulse of silence between the overhead throbbing and the bark of the guns, the flare made the street like a mirrored drawing-room. Above where Harrison stood peering at something jotted on an envelope, white-green incandescence flowed from the lovely shapely symbol, which slowly descended as it died -- the sky to the east reflected flamingo-pink nobody could have taken to be the dawn, the west was jagged with flames.

Right way, wrong way, Norway

A site called Honest Thinking, based in Norway, recently posted a manifesto (shouldn't we retire this word, with its Marxist associations?) about immigration. (Tip of the hat: Gates of Vienna)

The two editors responsible encourage others to reproduce the manifesto, so long as it is complete and verbatim. Right, then, here it goes:

The immigration policies currently in vogue in most Western countries show increasing signs of being unsustainable, and the associated problems are likely to grow ever more severe in the coming years. This is one of the largest ethical dilemmas of our time. We therefore believe the entire foundation for the prevailing regime needs to be reconsidered, and submit this manifesto as a starting point for reasoning about these challenges.

1. It is a moral duty to promote human rights all over the world.
2. The concept of human rights must not be confused with any particular legal implementation or formulation of that concept, since such explications could contain internal inconsistencies or imply consequences that would cause conflict with the previous tenet.
3. The worth of a human being is independent of his or her gender, religion, ethnic background, sexual preferences, culture, language, and other such markers.
4. Cooperation across cultural, language, religious, and ethnic borders is desirable and necessary.
5. Even so, culture, language, religion, and ethnicity are instrumental in establishing each individual’s identity, and thus central in forming his or her sense of belonging and loyalty. Any policy aimed at sustainability must take this into account.
6. It is therefore legitimate for any sovereign state to implement restrictions towards non-citizens in such a way that control over its demographic development is retained.
7. It is unacceptable, without foregoing careful consideration and proper democratic processes, that political dispositions be made to alter the demographic composition of a state in such a way that its stability, its inner cohesion, and the mutual loyalty of its population be threatened.

We are apprehensive of individuals, organizations, and other legal entities that try to quench free and open debate on the above issues, and regard such political actors as having little or no legitimacy in questions of democracy and human rights. Moreover, ideologies and political movements whose goals are irreconcilable with the above tenets should be considered devoid of moral and intellectual integrity, unless they are able to justify said discrepancy.

It's a strange mixture of conventional liberal pieties and daring (for Eurabia) nonconformity.

The former are contained in items 1,3, and 4. We need not detain ourselves with this boilerplate.

Item 2 is kind of overcast, but it seems to be saying that claiming it's for "human rights" does not automatically justify a law or policy. That's a very crucial point; too bad the authors couldn't shake off their legal or academic backgrounds enough to state it plainly.

Item 5 — "Culture, language, religion, and ethnicity are instrumental in establishing each individual’s identity, and thus central in forming his or her sense of belonging and loyalty" — is not helpful. All those factors play a role in a person's psychological makeup, but are they instrumental and central, which implies that everyone's essence consists of tribal loyalties? Politically, this is inadequate: it leaves out understanding arrived at by thinking. It also ignores nationality, apparently still a dirty word for the manifesters.

Item 5 is also deficient philosophically because it appears to give no place to an individual's spirit or soul. For some people, even today, spiritual truth as they perceive it is far more important than culture, etc. (True, the item does include religion, but in context it is very likely that this means formal religious doctrine, not an inner calling.)

As long as people are perceived, or perceive themselves, as a bunch of inherited or indoctrinated qualities glued together, with no "belonging and loyalty" to any higher truth, we will continue to have sectarian and ethnic strife.

Item 6 is very good.

So is item 7, except that "without foregoing careful consideration and proper democratic processes" sounds too much like an escape clause. Careful consideration by whom? Lots of multi-culti partisans working overtime for ethnic replacement believe they have carefully considered its advantages.

The postscript seems to be a ringing defense of free speech, but it too is a little wet. "We are apprehensive of individuals, organizations, and other legal entities that try to quench free and open debate on the above issues, and regard such political actors as having little or no legitimacy in questions of democracy and human rights" — so they might have a little legitimacy? "Ideologies and political movements whose goals are irreconcilable with the above tenets should be considered devoid of moral and intellectual integrity, unless they are able to justify said discrepancy" — now there's a weaselly pronouncement any politician could be proud of. In other words, such ideologies and political movements are unjustifiable, except when they're justified.

But I'll still give these gentlemen one thumb up. In Norway, this is pretty courageous stuff, even with its hedging. The Resistance is getting bolder in Europe, even as political correctness becomes harsher.

Mark your calendar: Free speech in the EU ends Sept. 11

The mayor of Brussels has banned a demonstration outside the EU headquarters against the Islamization of Europe. According to Paul Belien at the Brussels Journal:

Mayor Thielemans is worried that the demonstration will upset the large immigrant population of Brussels. Over half the inhabitants of the Brussels region are of foreign origin, many of them from Morocco. According to the mayor there is a real danger of violence between demonstrators and Muslims living in the neighbourhood. The latter might not tolerate native Europeans protesting against their continent becoming Eurabia.

So, as of September 11 — the day planned for the demonstration — it will be illegal for people to gather for a peaceful protest (peaceful as far as the protesters are concerned) because the non-natives are restless.

The arrogance of the EU masters has finally reached escape velocity from the hard-won right of citizens to express their views without fear. The EUrocrats no longer even feel compelled to cover up their suppression of free speech; all they need to do is point to the danger of a tribal mob making trouble because it won't like what it hears.

It will be a historic day, this September 11: the official beginning of a post-democratic, post-European Europe. The new Jacobins, mad daddies of a radical leftist-Islamic ruling class, have taken over the palace.

The protest sponsors haven't given up; they're looking for ways to circumvent the EU rulers, including showing up with blank signs. This is getting interesting. It coincides with other evidence that Europeans are waking up from their coma and even starting to take action to reverse the sinking of their culture into dhimmitude.

By the way, did your mainstream newspaper/TV station/radio station report this story? I'd be surprised. Not nearly as important as "30 Years After His Death, Elvis Lives on in the Digital Age," the page 1 head of the bubble-gum chewing USA Today.

UPDATE 8/15
I've had a look at the proposed Free Europe Constitution as suggested by my good friend Anonymous, and am not impressed. What do they mean by "Free Europe means human development in its richest diversity and is therefore good"? (Italics in the original.) "Human development" is bureaucratic babble that is either meaningless or signifies social engineering. "Richest diversity"? More bureaucratese, but I inherently distrust anything with the word "diversity" in it.

Also: "Decisions in the EU should be made by agreements between governments. Delegation of national legislative power to EU institutions is possible; withdrawal of such powers, both in specific cases and generally is equally possible." Agreements between governments have been happening for thousands of years: they're called treaties. Who needs the EU? The next sentence says that national governments can delegate their powers to the EU (but also withdraw the delegation) — but why give away power at all? The citizens of a country should retain all power over legislation that will affect them, not only on the national level but on the regional and local level as appropriate.

Finally, I see no mention here of uncontrolled immigration, the most disastrous result of the current EU setup.

In which the author converts to Pyrrhonism

Pyrrhonism, you will recall -- especially if you are very odd -- was an ancient philosophical system that carried skepticism to the limit.

It is said, in fact, that Pyrrhonists doubted their own existence. Descartes had to sit down and have a think about that. It led to his famous conclusion, "I think, therefore I am."

Well, maybe. But what was good enough for Descartes is not good enough for me. I was flirting with Pyrrhonism before, but several of today's news items have pushed me over the edge.

Bloggers are wont to introduce a link to a story with the line, "You can't make this stuff up." But some things are more absurd than that. Not only could no one make them up -- nobody could even imagine them. Nobody could imagine imagining them. Ergo, when I come across certain reports, I feel fairly certain that I do not exist, because they are beyond mortal capacity to conceive.

Take this:

A pensioner has been told she must stop tending a public flower bed unless she agrees to wear a fluorescent jacket, put up warning signs and use a lookout.

June Turnbull, 79, of Urchfront near Devizes, has nurtured the blooms on the plot for six years. But now she is being told to obey health and safety rules after being spotted by a county council official. ... Urchfont Parish Council has recently applied for a licence and has had a meeting with the county council.

"We need to get a licence from the Highways Authority to enable work on this bed to be done, people must wear a fluorescent jacket, have warning signs and have two people working there," Peter Newell, chairman of Urchfont Parish Council, told BBC News.

An old lady is beautifying a traffic island which the authorities, if left to themselves, would probably ignore till it declined into a weed patch. She gets socked by The State for taking some initiative to improve the quality of life in her village. Imagine the sheer bloody mindedness of it! Tending plants without the necessary petition, hearing, permit, and being kitted out in a fluorescent jacket while a "lookout" stands by.

The crime scene

But of course June Turnbull, being 79, was born about 1928, so she formed certain habits that pre-date the welfare state's bureaucratic apparatus and its settled principle that only the government can manage anything.

Or this:

A Peruvian national in the U.S. illegally and who was previously charged with raping a 5-year-old girl pleaded not guilty Friday in the execution-style slayings of three young college students, a day after he surrendered to the Newark mayor. ...

FOX News has learned Carranza, who has a fake Social Security number, had been arrested on charges of raping a 5-year-old girl and then threatening the child and her parents. In that case he faced a 31-count indictment. In another, he was arrested on assault charges stemming from a bar fight. Immigration officials apparently were aware of Carranza's illegal status since his prior arrests, according to Essex County Sheriff Armando Fontoura.

And this:

Portland-area police arrested Alejandro Emeterio "Alex" Rivera Gamboa four times on drunken driving charges over the past seven years, but he went unnoticed by immigration officials until this week, when he and a cousin were accused in the death of 15-year-old Dani Countryman in Milwaukie.

Both Rivera Gamboa and his cousin, Gilberto Javier "Gabe" Arellano Gamboa, recently admitted that they entered the country illegally from Mexico, federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials confirmed Thursday. If Rivera Gamboa's illegal status had been discovered at the time of his earlier arrests, it is likely -- but not certain -- that he would have been deported, immigration officials said.

"I've never asked somebody if they're legal or illegal," said Lt. Jason Gates, spokesman for the Multnomah County Sheriff's Office. "It's none of my business."

A county sheriff officer says it's none of his business if someone is legal or illegal? Sorry, I was under the illusion that figuring out whether someone's actions are legal or illegal is part of what we pay these so-called civil servants for.

Silly me. Obviously, we dress them up in resplendent uniforms with knife-edge creases, give them shiny badges and all the latest telecommunications gear, so they can write up traffic tickets. (Or maybe stop old ladies from planting flowers without a permit.) Determining a drunken driver's citizenship status and possibly preventing a murder is above the lieutenant's pay grade, and would only get him into trouble with the "compassionate" dwellers in Oregon, who have made their state a legal sanctuary for illegals -- apparently, they have a taste for paradox.

I don't know about you, but these things are beyond my capacity to imagine, let alone believe. Clearly, I do not exist, and will insist on it as long as I'm around.

Getting over the blues

Despite my profound ignorance of HTML, I've been fiddling with the template of Reflecting Light.

It is with no small hesitation that I have changed the look of a world-renowned, historic institution. This design evolution (or, if you prefer, somewhat more intelligent design) was prompted by the First Law of Blogdom: Do not be boring.

The previous livery seemed to me over-saturated with blue, and characterized by a shortage of contrast. Well, I am now emerging from my Blue Period. In this redesign I tried quite a few colors and combinations, some very quiet, others an Elton John's nightmare. This is my temporary final vision, and wants living with for a while to determine whether further tweaking is called for.

Meanwhile, feel free to comment. This is only a survey and will take only a few minutes of your time. No salesman will call.

If you dote on quantification, you can rate it on a scale of 1 ("You've taken a reprehensible blog and made it worse") to 10 ("Can't take my eyes off it"). Have at it, vox populi.

Looking for a safe harbor beyond the Aztlantic Ocean

The blogger Tanstaafl (an abbreviation, I think, of Robert Heinlein's aphorism "there ain't no such thing as a free lunch") is fed up with the Mexification of southern California and its ignorant Anglo enablers. He holds out no hope that the trend can be reversed, and he's looking for a sanctuary to move his family and himself to. But even Tanstaafl reckons it will be hard to find, with the country's rulers doing everything possible to erase the nation's borders, history, culture, and traditional ethnicity.

If you are already feeling depressed today, you might want to save reading his posting for another time.

Visas for refugees from Britain

The Daily Express, which modestly describes itself as the world's greatest newspaper, reports that 4,000 souls are trying to kiss off the scepter'd isle every week.

Liam Clifford, a former immigration control officer, set up globalvisas.com as a one-man band 12 years ago. He now employs 60 people and is in the process of opening new offices in both South Africa and Australia. Mr Clifford said: “It’s absolutely phenomenal. People are trying to get away to wherever they can, and most are successful.

“Ironically, one of the main reasons for leaving is the overstretch of services due to increasing immigration into the UK. People are looking for the better standard of living offered by other countries, as even the most idyllic villages in Britain are under pressure from rising populations."

In keeping with our current national theme, "Invade the World, Invite the World," we should set up a special visa category for Brits who are fleeing, in the article's words, "immigration … and the burden it is placing on their communities and local authorities. The dearth of good schools, spiralling house prices, rising crime and tax increases are also driving people away."

After all, we in these United States have no problems with immigration, crime, or state-run schools, and our house prices are mostly spiraling downward. A good chunk of those 4,000 Brits a month would be an answered prayer for real estate agents.

And we can hardly turn away our transatlantic cousins when our boundless compassion and welcoming skills extend even to Iraqis "identified as terrorists or supporters of terrorist groups." (Tip of the hat: Lawrence Auster.)

A large-scale visa program for British refugees would probably net this country some of the U.K.'s brighter, more far-seeing, skilled, and PC-averse inhabitants. Then let's offer the younger and more physically fit among them training and armaments to take back their former country.

Maitreya

Maitreya
China, 6th C. AD

To Buddhists, Maitreya is the Buddha who is to come.

There should be no need of another Buddha. The previous Enlightened One, some 2,500 years ago, told us what we need to know and do. His teaching remains pure and shining, so much that even Akbar -- one of the best, or least bad, of the Mughal Emperors -- could express its message succinctly: "The world is a bridge; pass over it but build no house upon it."

Non-attachment, freedom from desire, kindness to all creatures, and all else that flows from the Buddha's Four Great Truths and Eightfold Path have only the most precarious hold in this world of transitory appearances. Rather are we drearily enfolded in loss, pain, and threat. The signs have never looked worse in my lifetime. A militant, at time violent drive toward a single worldwide Muslim Caliphate; the breakup of nations into squabbling tribes carried by mass migration; ecological near-bankruptcy; and a Western civilization most of whose people are drugged on consumerism.

Perhaps things have always looked this bad. Serious reading of history tells us that things were always falling apart, the best in decline. Sometimes it was worse than that, like when the European unities of the Middle Ages were undone and Europe was torn to shreds in the 16th century by religious wars and persecutions.

I can understand the situation no further than that each of us must do what we can for goodness, and remember that we see only through the eyes of matter, not of Spirit -- except in rare circumstances. The Eastern traditions that we know principally as the Vedanta and Buddhism tell us that when humanity has thoroughly lost the way, a new Enlightened Master appears to relight the million candles that have burned themselves out.

Lama Govinda was meditating in a monastery when he had a vision arising from a stone wall that he identified with Maitreya, and which he described in The Way of the White Clouds:

I only felt that there was something about the surface of this wall that held my attention, as if it were a fascinating landscape. But no, it was far from suggesting a landscape. These apparently accidental forms were related to each other in some way; they grew more and more plastic and coherent. Their outlines became clearly defined and raised from the flat background ...

Before I knew how it all happened, a majestic human figure took shape before my eyes. It was seated upon a throne, with both feet on the ground, the head crowned with a diadem, the hands raised in a gesture, as if explaining the points of an intricate problem: it was the figure of Buddha Maitreya, the Coming One, who already now is on his way to Buddhahood, and who, like the sun before it rises over the horizon, sends his rays of love into this world of darkness, through which he has been wandering in innumerable forms, through innumerable births and deaths.

Not yet a Buddha, Maitreya is in this world now, perhaps confused as we are, fearful as we are, human as we are. Still, perhaps, trying to build on that bridge that exists only to cross from matter to Spirit. Many lives have passed, many more await in the womb of time.

You might be acquainted with this Maitreya: someone you have been with all your life, whose mind you think you know but of which you are ignorant of all but the tiniest, surface part. Maitreya is learning the lessons of the school of the physical plane, and finding it to be a hard school, but slowly realizing the glory of the Light and how to transmit it once again when the time comes. It could be Maitreya bears your name while on the short thread between this birth, this death.