Tell me why, how.
I myself, run out of ideas, words, concepts when I try to understand the unrelieved ugly.
I came to my desk to write about two persons murdered in Mumbai, Alan Scherr and his daughter Naomi, age 13… he a meditation teacher and astrologer and his daughter an irrepressible, lively soul. They belonged to a group called Synchronicity Community, which seems an offshoot of transcendental meditation.
I’ve dear spiritual family in Mumbai for 30 some years now, and yet I have never been to India. When I looked at Mumbai tonight by satellite (how wondrous is that) I see it is an island in the shape of an open hand in the Arabian Sea, and at the wrist is the mouth of a Mother River, Ulhas. All this and more draws many seekers, finders, knowers, unknowers to Mumbai… somewhat as we here in the western states still have Rendezvous, gatherings of the tribes at a single place on these mountains and plains…
At Rendezvous, the tribes are all quite disparate in ritual and ideology, but all at root all believing in a straight heart… a credo all can praise regardless of differences.
Something like that in Mumbai too, a hub of a wheel with many tribal spokes, many imported from far away… but with a rooted love of sacred thought …that each can understand in the other, despite all differences.
…but also, something else rising up from the tragedy in Mumbai, besides men who murder, something else ugly and unredeemed, something that turns me away from writing an obituary about Alan and Naomi, and instead turning a phenomenon over and over, an ugly one, that has grown up around Alan and Naomi’s deaths… one that I think eerily portrays a holograph of ‘terrorist psychological motives and underlayments’ ….in microcosm.
Maybe you will see some useful parallels/ insights in comparing the larger world of mayhem, and this small world of mayhem I’m about to show you… I’d certainly like to hear what you think/ see.
As I began to write about Alan and Naomi being murdered in Mumbai, I found my way to the website the Synchronistic Community had lovingly set up for them, where people could leave comfort and remembrances for the surviving family.
I have to say, that this is not the first time I’ve seen this… perhaps you’ve seen it many times before also. Perhaps like me, it still leaves a why? in your mind, no matter how you turn it in your knowing heart.
Here, from the condolence site set up for Alan and Naomi’s memory:
Guest
2008-11-28
ALLAH
PRAISE BE TO ALLAH!!! ALLAH WANTS ALL AMERICANS DEAD. THE PROPHECIES WILL NOT BE REALIZED UNTIL ALL INFIDELS ARE SLAUGHTERED AND ALL MEN ARE BROUGHT UNDER THE HOLY LAW OF ALLAH WITH WOMEN AS THEIR FAITHFUL SERVANTS. NOBODY IS ENLIGHTENED UNTIL THEY ARE UNDER THE HOLY LAW OF ALLAH. AND NOT ALL WHO CLAIM TO BE MUSLIMS ARE MUSLIM, BUT RATHER INFIDELS WHO SHALL ALSO PERISH. PRAISE BE TO ALLAH FOR THIS GLORIOUS VICTORY OVER THE INFIDELS!
Aryeh
2008-11-28
From California
With deep love and tears, I honor Alan and Naomi. I was recently in Mumbai on a spiritual tour to India. I know that they would have been my best friends. May all beings be at peace. May all beings be free from suffering May the family be comforted.Guest
2008-11-28
Sympathy
I am so sorry for your loss. I have been hearing the news of this tragedy and was especially touched with the death of the 13 year old girl. I have a 12 year old girl and know how I would feel if it happened to her. I will ask God to comfort you.2008-11-28
To the crazy guy talking rubbish
Hey you. Allah is MY god. and i believe i know better than you. You are humiliating your own religion. Allah never asks any muslim to KILL innocents. and just for the record, I DOUBT THE TERRORISTS WERE EVEN MUSLIMS. so please stop. you are really making a fool of yourself. I am a muslim too and I agree that there is no god but Allah (Allahuakbar) but please, be a REAL muslim. and leave the Americans alone you racist.Guest
2008-11-28
PRAISE BE TO ALLAH!!!!
ALLAH WANTS ALL AMERICANS DEAD. THE PROPHECIES WILL NOT BE REALIZED UNTIL ALL INFIDELS ARE SLAUGHTERED AND ALL MEN ARE BROUGHT UNDER THE HOLY LAW OF ALLAH WITH WOMEN AS THEIR FAITHFUL SERVANTS. DEATH TO AMERICA!!!!A mother and wife
2008-11-28
sympathy
Dear Kia, As a mother and wife as well, I can only begin to know your pain. My heart goes out to you. The love you shared will never go away. It is a real and infinite gift. Trust in this. LisaGuest
2008-11-28
f—- muslims
hey, f— you towel-headed muslim we should f—ing kill all you f—ing muslims. at least we got a good start in iraq. GOD BLESS AMERICA
And it goes on. And it’s not about Muslims and non-Muslims. It’s not about Christians and non-Christians. It’s not about Meditators and non-Meditators. And, last I checked, the hearts were outnumbering the mindless by about 15 to 1 on this tiny site.
The internet sometimes seems to me as though the unconscious has suddenly ruptured and broken open, spilling its disorganized id all over the place. I sometimes see souls who write so unarmored or naively or wisely or wandering about in interesting ways, as well as minds that write in some odd version of seeming hate-mind.
About the last, I think about how rage can, if nursed long enough, act like a bacteria that cannot be mediated without effective antidote. Like infection, rage and its attractant, hatred, just grows more deeply, eating up good tissue that can then no longer perform other purposes.
I saw this same phenomenon of overlaying with what I’d call sort of a ‘psychological smearing’ atop the heartfelt words of others… and in spades when the Kim family went missing in the mountains of Oregon two years ago this week. James Kim was a beloved force at CNET; he wrote a wildly popular online column. Friends of the Kims, too, set up a forum for people to leave messages of hope and love while the search parties climbed through the Rogue River ravines looking for the father of this little family who’d taken a wrong turn and been stranded on a mountain for nine days, burning the car tires up to keep warm… The family became desperate, and slender Kim had left his wife and two small children to go for help.
On the Kim family site too, were several scabborous voices over and over, page after page who wrote evil unconscionable things, wishing the father dead, wishing the children to die, cursing the lives of the innocent. James Kim was found dead. He’d heroically walked the river in a thin little shirt and trousers trying to get help for his family. He’d gone eight miles in slick river rock country before he could go no more. The evil commenters crowed over James Kim’s death also.
Most of the time, I’ve learned to be of the ‘Note it, say something about it, then ignore it” school in these matters. Sometimes just “Glance at it, forget it immediately” school, especially since screed is actually most often boring and predictable in lexicon and epithetical formula.
But sometimes, very sometimes, I wish there was a way to stay and to see deeper into the person who writes such… see if anything can be done to help turn this infection toward even a modicum of healing… to stand in the invective and lay down some decent medicine, to see if there isn’t a small, young and frightened soul locked away in the back room somewhere, one that definitely might come forward if given even some modicum of reliable shelter
and yet though I know for a fact that that can be effective, I also know, sometimes not. I grew up in the back woods where packs of wild dogs ran, and if a feral dog contracted rabies… well, sometimes the creature became so maddened, the creature not only bit others, it viciously bit itself, sometimes literally killing itself by recklessly tearing open its own arteries. Reactive, yes. But more so, driven to extinct thought, weighing, consideration. And only functioning with whatever was left.
There is something in these kinds of angry attacks on others’ sacred gatherings, that strikes me as being an auto-attack on the screed-writer him or herself… not a death wish, but a rageful instruction ‘from somewhere’ to destroy oneself, to draw others who are not peace-bearing to do the screed-writer big harm in return.
Somewhere in here, there is a trope for how war continues, is fed by action and reaction, avenging and re-avenging. Over and over. Something striking that will not weigh, that will not consider more than an nth of an instant before striking… or else is somehow programmed to self-destruct….
Does this make some sense to you? I wonder about these things late tonight here in the Rockies. What can be put in place so that sacred space is left to those who created it? What rather than ignoring, or saying peace, or turning away, or battering right back?
I think and look out over the dark blue snow on the ground this now after midnight here; wet snow, the kind that makes really good snow angels. And it is cold as an Arctic flagpole, and the window glass looking out to the dark little lake I live on, is moist inside, thin old windows in this little low ceiling room, I need to caulk, well, what I mean to say, is get the old guy at the local Ace hardware to teach me how to caulk, soon…
and I’m thinking about how my people, and I think your people too, far back, but some even now, especially tribal people … at sacred rites, hold all to be peace and formality… somber, respectful.
But, at the accompanying festivals and dances afterward, these often have devils and demons, people dressed as such, who run through the festivities turning everything upside down and doing the opposite of what is most warranted; the Iroquois so-called ‘false face’ society cum masks, still functions, for instance.
There is a devil dance that’s part of the Conquista dance, and they are not clowns—they are portraying the bloodthirstiness of conquest and lust for gold and slaves. Sometimes the red masked devil in the old Magyar farm village spring rituals carried a floppy straw wand and switched people who didn’t get out of his way soon enough for his taste…. which was never soon enough. The farmer Magyars are a people over-run by every barbaric tribe riding over the Carpathians. Their ‘devil’ too, perhaps represents what some might call ‘generational memory’ of murderous times.
And the point of the devil dancers? scaring the scare-able, angering the anger-able, prompting concern about disruption of heart and peace? Maybe. But further perhaps, eliciting from the soulfully realistic, laughter… laughter from the majority… those who can see that its just one devil per many souls. Not the other way around.
Perspective. Something about perspective of heart and mind. Not to lose that, no matter what else has occurred. Even demons. Even death. Eventually, learning, in time, to refuse to be made dead by it all. To not allow marauders to add notches for making the living walk as though they are dead too. To push back with all the radiant life that’s in us. Ferociously if need be, gently if possible. Not war, Life.
I wonder if we traditionally include devils in the festivals so we can, in a sense, ritualize reality… in order that people remember such things again. Where to place the emphasis. Even in darkness. Maybe that’s the coded instruction to earthlings about taking up a far greater perspective…. some might say a divine one.
I’m not sure this explains more than just a few of the bones about devil and demonic behavior that gleefully tries to murder innocents, or tries to spread merde on freshly opened wounds. But, too, tonight, I’m not sure I can think of a better remembrance for this moment for the passing of innocent lives in Mumbai than to just hold the grieving souls until enough time passes and a good many will give somehow, somewhere, a big hearty sacred laugh… right back into the face of death.
…refusing to die to Life to please the demon.