TURN OUT THE LIGHTS

(THE TWILIGHT’S MOST RECENT GLEAMING)

By Michael J. Clark

1848 Onyx Alley

Eugene, Oregon USA 97403

mclark7@mindspring.com

For Alan Greenspan,

the last of the great white whaleboat captains.

The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them, till they are left living on with half a heart and half a lung. That intangible malignity which has been from the beginning; to whose dominion even the modern Christians ascribe one-half of the worlds; which the ancient Ophites of the east reverenced in their statue devil; -- Ahab did not fall down and worship it like them; but deliriously transferring its idea to the abhorred white whale, he pitted himself, all mutilated, against it. All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it.

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, p. 200.

INTRODUCTION

Writing, for me, is an act of discovery. It is a turning of the mind’s sometimes-lucid light on a darkened landscape of ideas, hoping and trusting that illumination will occur. I write in order to see reality more clearly. Writing is an act of focusing the mind through a high-powered lens on things hidden in nature, images existent in dark energy, dream matter – using the mind to draw these hidden things out into the open.

Writing, for me, is not a linear experience – it sometimes involves wandering from object to object – this can be maddening for some readers who appreciate the diameter more than the circle. Writing, for me, is a weaving in and out of ideas, in and out of symbols, in and out of meanings, which, when stitched together, create a visible object, a tapestry built by metaphor into a recognizable form.

In this way poetry is different than prose. Poetry leaps from idea to idea; poetry wanders, gets lost sometimes. Prose is causal, building an argument in a linear fashion, laying out a matrix based on temporal cause and effect.

This books is a poet’s view of history, a poet’s view of the real (non-linear) causes of historic manifestations. As such, a reader must allow for the occasional drifting in and out of what may seem like foreign, unrelated landscapes, These landscapes are, trust me, connected, but perhaps not connected in a linear fashion. A spider web is a whole structure, each part necessary to the whole – but not every strand of the structure is directly connected to every other strand. The structure of this book is somewhat like the structure of a spider’s web.

I began this book as an attempt to rationalize (clarify) my own understanding of my immediate environment, which had been darkened suddenly by a constellation of events: my own retirement surely; also the sudden destruction of Western Civilization through the devastation of a financial system seemingly constructed with great care by the self-adoring ‘masters of the universe’ on Wall Street, in London and in other western world capitals.

How had this happened? Where would it lead?

I had a fairly clear understanding when I began of the metaphysical engine driving History’s manifestations and de-constructions: that human and historical manifestations on earth were divided into periods of Day (activity, building, masculine solar organizing energy) and periods of Night (relative inactivity, deconstruction, feminine lunar dis-organizing energy) – anti-entropy (negentropy) and entropy. I did not expect, however, when I began writing this book for this Day/Night sequence to appear in history with such regularity as to make it predictable.

While writing this book, I discovered a 36-year cycle in American economic expansions (top to top) and an 18-year half-cycle (top to bottom). Was this kind of precision possible in Nature?

The mind will try to organize chaos into a rational system in order to give itself some security in confronting the shapelessness, the nothingness, the chaos, of reality. Perhaps these precise cycles are nothing more than this mania for mental organization which gives the human mind the illusion of ‘knowing’.

Still, I have come to believe – through seeing – that the most recent Day-Cycle of Western Economic Expansion ended (or should have ended) in 2001, when the Dot Com Bubble burst, causing essentially worthless internet companies that had been pumped full of hot air by duplicitous investment bankers to fall back to earth after soaring and making many of these duplicitous bankers millionaires or even billionaires. I say should have begun in 2001 had not Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan essentially – in a kind of mad positivistic ideological reaction – begun devaluing the American Dollar hand-over-fist in an attempt to avert the deflation that was needed to balance the inflationary financial bubble-factory that had driven America toward an economic precipice, making his colleagues in the American Ruling Class billions of dollars in the process – before it all came crashing down.

Cheap money; more debt; declining productivity – how, again, did this formula translate into a stronger, leaner, more competitive America? It didn’t. It translated only into more debt for most Americans and for the American government – and more wealth – an obscene amount of wealth in fact – for a handful of America’s ruling class, those in banking, finance, and insurance especially, but also in housing and energy.

An example of this obscene level of wealth is former Secretary of the Treasury (and CEO of Goldman Sachs) Henry Paulson who made, it has been reported, more than $400 million dollars in his position at Goldman Sachs, then transferred his power seat to the Bush Administration, then blackmailed the U.S. Congress (and through them the American citizen) for trillions of dollars of taxpayer money to bail out his friends at Goldman Sachs when the pyramid scheme they had collectively constructed collapsed in 2008.

I remember reading what a great ‘master of the universe’ Hank Paulson was, what a giant of finance, what a titan of American commercial life – a genius, indeed. Really? And I had been wondering why this titan of finance was not sharing a prison cell with everyone’s favorite thief, Bernard Madoff? Paulson’s plundering of the American Treasury is the greatest act of thievery in the history of the Earth.

2001 was also the year of the September 11^th Muslim attacks on American commercial, political and military symbols, the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York City being the most devastating of these attacks. This attack symbolically marked the end of the 18-year economic expansion of Western Civilization (the ideal of the ‘individual’ and the triumph of ‘private’ enterprise) that began with Ronald Reagan’s capitalist revolution in 1983. Day-Cycles exemplify ‘private enterprise’, and focus on individual gain, individual activity; Night-cycles exemplify ‘social enterprise’, and focus on group survival, group activity.

The period of 1983-2001 marked the 18-year period of economic expansion that followed the 18 year period of economic stagflation from 1965-1983, during which time America endured both high unemployment and high inflation, a flat investment market on Wall Street, and the spiritual death experience emblematic of the Counter-Culture movement, as the civil rights rebellion, the war in Vietnam and the general anti-Capitalist flavor of the period cast doubt on the purity of America’s history, exposing racial atrocity, economic bullying, and militaristic terrorism in Asia and Latin America. Clearly, this period produced the deflation of the American Ego – self-accusation, social fragmentation and polarization, civil disaffection and even armed conflict against the white, male power structure.

Ego expansion, inflation, requires and assumes social unity, either through a shared sense of danger, or through the enforced conformism – and through the shared doctrine of ‘individual responsibility’. Ego contraction, deflation, produces a climate of social division that threatens the government, the ruling class, and the economic hierarchy of the civilization: the very fabric of the society becomes torn.

This is where we are headed, straight into social division, polarization between the haves and have-nots, anger at the government and their masters in the Ruling Class (mostly white, mostly men) perhaps revolution. This disintegration will continue until around 2019, when the negative energy of the deflation period (‘emptying out’) will give way to the more positive energy of the inflation experience (‘filling up’).

Period A. 2001 – 2019: Night Cycle Deflation, Social Fragmentation, Chaos

Period B. 1983 – 2001: Day Cycle Inflation, Higher forms of Organization

Period C. 1965 – 1983: Night Cycle Deflation, Social Fragmentation, Chaos

Period D. 1947 – 1965: Day Cycle Inflation, higher forms of Organization

Period E. 1929 – 1947: Night Cycle Deflation, Social Fragmentation, Chaos

Period F. 1911 – 1929: Day Cycle Inflation, higher forms of Organization

Period G. 1893 – 1911: Night Cycle Deflation, Social Fragmentation, Chaos

Period H. 1875 – 1893: Day Cycle Inflation, higher forms of Organization

Period I. 1857 – 1875: Night Cycle Deflation, Social Fragmentation, Chaos

Period J. 1839 – 1957: Day Cycle Inflation, higher forms of Organization

Period K. 1821 – 1839: Night Cycle Deflation, Social Fragmentation, Chaos

Period L. 1803 – 1821: Day Cycle Inflation, higher forms of Organization

Period M. 1785 – 1803: Night Cycle Deflation, Social Fragmentation, Chaos

Period N. 1767 – 1785: Day Cycle Inflation, higher forms of Organization

The reader will see that the periods of deflation do include periods of social fragmentation, polarization and chaos, civil war, periods of class warfare and periods of economic depression. Periods of inflation (ego-inflation, not necessarily monetary inflation) include a return to national roots, a baptism, a washing clean of the sins of the past (a drinking from the River Lethe in the sense of the Greek Myth, a suspension of accusatory Memory), often a threat to national security and the resurrection of the Father Figure image – and a reawakening of religious imagery, embedded in symbols of Old Testament ‘chosen’ people imagery.

Put in the local vernacular, Ego-deflation Night-Cycles empower the Indian persona from American history. Ego-inflation Day-Cycles empower the Cowboy persona from American history. The ‘Indian’ is tribal (group-oriented), lunar, horizontal in orientation – animated by the imagistic dream content – and by the ethic of equality. The ‘Cowboy’ is individualistic, solar, vertical in orientation – climbing the ladder in search of objective recognition – animated by the scientific ‘real world’ of causality and engineering, city-building, active god-like behavior, and by the ethic of freedom.

It is this active, god-like behavior – pride, or the Greek idea of Hubris – that causes Adam and Eve to fall from the pure state of Paradise and to be cast into darkness (death, illness, decline, depression), which is the essence of the Night-Cycle of Ego Deflation, as the human being suddenly awakens to his own limitations, his own mortality, his own inability to stem the tide of the collapse through the old Cowboy logic of hard work, will power, and positive thinking – that is, of exclusion of the shadow, the negative energy, from the picture, creating the illusion of unity, a unity of parts.

Pubic spending won’t fix the decline; engineers can’t curb the collapse; politicians can’t talk or cheer their way out of the reality of the contraction. Nothing but time (18 years) can resurrect the dead power-source and inflate the ideals of civilization again.

The book looks more closely at these different periods of expansion and decline.

In this book, I will also look more closely at the 18 year cycle as it fits a 4-season cycle as a paradigm of historical development, a schema that owes something to both Gambatitsta Vico and Oswald Spengler.

This image represents a visual system of History’s stages – and applies to 18-year cycles and to historical life cycles in a more general sense.

History begins in a love of God, then transforms into a love of the world (of men), then returns to a love of God is three major steps, through four major personas or guardians. Black Giant (Nature, Dark Ages, Space: Midnight); Renaissance Man (First Middle Ages, Dawn); White Giant (Man, Empiricism, Time, Noon); Revolutionary Romantic Man (Second Middle Ages, Dusk).

This process will be examined quite thoroughly in the book that follows.

The Day-Cycle is essentially an idealization of the Masculine Principle. The Night-Cycle is an idealization of the Feminine Principle. The Day-Cycle idealizes physical strength, wealth, body, athletic ability, business acumen, heroism, military skills, mathematics, technology, construction abilities, religious discipline, the moral principle of Power or Freedom. The Night-Cycle idealizes love, thought, mind, spirituality, poetry, art, philosophy, mythology, religious mysticism, the moral principle of Love or Equality.

During Night-Cycles, men tend to grow their hair long and dress and act more like women.

During Day-Cycles, women tend to cut their hair short and dress and act more like men.

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TURN OUT THE LIGHTS

(THE TWILIGHT’S MOST RECENT GLEAMING)

The party's over,

It's time to call it a day

They've burst your pretty balloon

And taken the moon away.

It's time to wind up the masquerade

Just make your mind up

The piper must be paid.

The party's over

The candles flicker and dim

You danced and dreamed through the night

It seemed to be right

Just being with him.

Now you must wake up,

All dreams must end

Take off your makeup,

The party's over

It's all over, my friend

-Words by Betty Comden and Adolph

Green and Music by Jule Styne

CHAPTER ONE.

AS THE WORLD TURNS…DOWN

In April 2008, I retired after working thirty years as an administrative assistant in the Architecture Department at the University of Oregon.

Almost immediately, upon retiring, my vision of the future turned black. I was standing before an abyss. True, my life patterns, thirty years of the creation and preservation of a ritual, had ended – and I was undergoing a kind of psychic death. But there was more than this. The precipice at which I was standing was a cultural, racial gulf. The world we had known so well – which we had taken for granted and assumed would continue into the foreseeable future – was ending.

In Jungian psychological literature, when interpreting the ‘inner’ meaning of medieval alchemy, this period is called the ‘black sun’, Sol negro, and indicates the beginning of the soul’s descent into the underworld, the sun’s descent into death and darkness, prior to eventual rebirth on the other side of the Night. The soul descends into the ‘ocean of the unconscious’ and undergoes a death and purification ritual, washing itself clean of sins, facing its own judgments against its impurities and imperfections – and enters a period of dormancy, like a seed lying latent in the cold earth – to be awakened only, and with a new vision, a new body, and a new personal mission, when stirred to life by the warm rays of the virginal, Spring Sun.

Understood spiritually or psychologically, alchemy was the story of the individual’s quest to attain rebirth from a moral death, a popped Ego-bubble, that occurs at the end of a Day-cycle of active external social living – i.e., a Day of material existence. The vas, the container inside of which the alchemist tried to transform lead into gold, was the individual soul, inside of which the now-isolate human being attempted to transform the heavy night of a leaden depression and loss into the new gold of solar regeneration.

When the Day turned into Night, a new body was ultimately re-fashioned from the remnants of the old. The physical body weakened; and the spiritual body, the soul, became the vehicle of this transitory reckoning in the land of Darkness. Despair, Depression, loss of body and wealth, were psychic stages in this solar cleansing process.

It became clear to me, almost as if a light switch had been suddenly turned off, that the American financial system (and the global economy that America had been championing under the guise of ‘free market capitalism’ for so long) was heading off a precipice. There was nothing we could do to stop it. The world we had known for so long was slowly, irrevocably vanishing, matter being swallowed by a vast black hole that resided in the very center of our economic galaxy.

The world was ending.

And ‘positive thinking’, a cheerleading of material markets by its political and intellectual and practical enthusiasts, with their rational, technological ingenuity, which had helped to engender this most recent phase of the Great American Empire’s expansion (and its offspring, the global economic order), would not be able to stem the inevitable turning of Day into Night, the irresistible transformation of Positive into Negative Energy.

This book is about philosophical principles. It is about how the world really works and what really led to the collapse of world capitalism. It is not about financial principles so much. Writers will argue about the financial cause(s) of the collapse: the housing bubble, engineered by Alan Greenspan and his disciple Ben Bernanke; greed of Wall Street bankers, mortgage brokers and mortgage companies, federal agencies, lack of federal oversight. Sophisticated mortgage bonds will be blamed, credit swaps, mortgage insurance. President George Bush will be blamed. American consumers will also be blamed. Also targeted will be the lust for status and credit and consumer goods, which lust had driven the global feeding frenzy – and which had generated personal global wealth on a scale never before seen in human history.

Yes, there was a good side to this expansion. The good side was probably clear to everyone. Now we will get to see the shadow-side that accrues from a global loss of balance in values.

In my mind, these ‘financial causes’ are all effects of the expansion rather than cause. The ecstasy of greed creates corruption, theft, misuse of power, many forms of criminality, and desperation; shameful human behavior is often illuminated in much the same way as a low ocean tide reveals garbage, bones, dead bodies, as the water retreats from its raucous and relatively lawless period of high tide, revealing evidence of crimes committed during the raging of the mad period of expansion of the will. Bernie Madoff is not the only criminal who has been exposed by the receding of the water of greed. A government, if truly interested in prosecuting white-collar crimes, could busy itself for a decade pursuing criminal acts in banking, investment banking, mortgage-abuse, and bribery of government officials that have occurred in the last two decades, but especially the last eight years.

I, personally, do not blame George Bush for the collapse of the western financial system. He cannot control every limb of the American political tree, control every aspect of the unwieldy, voracious, political beast. However, the Republican ideology which has been in power since the advent of Ronald Reagan, which demands that ‘business be allowed to do what it does best’, with less and less government scrutiny, is, without question, responsible for both the creation and the destruction of the booming global economy.

We must remember that what business does best is to generate profits – the shadow side of this profit-generation is the practice of cheating and stealing and manipulating laws and law-makers in homage to the God of Wealth and the ideal of plutocracy. Business seeks to destroy or diminish competition, so that it can raise prices and, where possible, scalp the public for necessary or unnecessary goods and services. Higher profits and lower costs are what make a business successful.

The obscene profits generated by oil companies in the last decade give us a pretty good picture of what unregulated business is all about, when it is not regulated by laws rigorously set up to protect the consumer from unscrupulous business practices.

There is a thin line between regulations protecting the consumer and regulations serving economic expansion in an affluent society, both of these ends ultimately being the goal.

We are emerging from – and this will involve a very painful recalibration of our virtue -- a rapacious age of materialism, business expansion, glorification of the entrepreneur, the fleecing of the consumer by banks and credit agencies – an Age of Greed (an Age of White Collar Mafiosos) that has turned most Americans and most Europeans and many world citizens into credit-slaves, eager to exchange their own financial freedom for the seeming economic success defined by unending consumption in the name of prosperity and technological progress. Success is measured in this type of society by the number and quality of objects one owns: houses, vehicles, electronic devices, designer clothes, etc. When I write that we, as a society and as a globe and as a race, have turned our back on God, this is my meaning: Human character is not the measure of the man in this age; but material goods are the measure. In Biblical history, God turns His back on Man when Man forgets God. Metaphorically, this is what happens when the Night-Cycle of death and pain succeed the Day-Cycle of pride and wealth and self-worship.

When I describe the shadow-side of the economic expansion, I am also very aware of its opposite: the relative political peace and economic well-being that has graced the world, more or less, since the defeat of fascism in 1945.

I am not a hater of business, or of the business class, and their political party in America, the Republicans, although it may seem that way from my first few statements. In my view Ronald Reagan ‘saved’ America from the chaos and stagnation of a protracted democratic rule – the surrender to the malaise of nihilism, so wonderfully exemplified by President Jimmy Carter, with his messianic vision of self-sacrifice and the desired death of American Exceptionalism. There was a time for the Republicans – the personification of the Cowboy myth in America – the prophets of free enterprise, individualism, law and order, science and reason, survival through strength, the glory of wealth and social hierarchy and Man above and segregated from Nature. A rising to the trumpet of Empire.

However, there is also a time for the Democrats – the personification of the Indian myth in America – the prophets of a planned economy, the community, justice, poetry, art, metaphysics and philosophy, survival through diplomatic alliances, the glory of thought and culture; with humanity as a wise and modest part of an integrated Nature.

The Republicans represent the Day Hero in all its Solar bodily glory and youth.

The Democrats represent the Night Hero in all its Lunar glory of culture and thought and maturity.

The Republicans rule the Day World of Science, Trade, Engineering, City-Building and the manifestation of the order of Empire: the life of the body.

The Democrats rule the Night World of Metaphysics, Art, Music, Literature, Philosophy: the life of the soul.

The Republicans are the manifestation of the Sun. The Democrats are the manifestation of the Moon.

When I speak of the real cause of the financial meltdown in 2008, I make reference to the mechanism of duality which drives all phenomenological expression at least on this Earth, and, possibly, in this Universe. The discovery of anti-matter in the 1920’s seems to indicate this Law of Duality is an essential character of this universe. Religious thought dating back thousands of years has assured us that duality is the guiding principle of all manifestation. Some religious thought, especially that generated in the Mediterranean, insists this duality is the manifestation of God (light) and the Devil (darkness), two principles which are engaged in an eternal struggle on Earth for control of the world. Asian thought (Hindu and Buddhist thought most clearly) understand this duality to be a secondary manifestation of the world, and, as such, an illusion. The world is a ring, a stage, in which the struggle or dance between light and darkness is essentially the illusion driving all life into activity, creating passion, politics, war, the struggle of ideas. Us against them; I love that woman; communism is better than capitalism; Day is good and Night is bad.

Asian philosophy says the essential nature of reality is Whole, the One, Unity. And when the One splits in to Two, this is where all the trouble begins.

But, this split is necessary and it is periodical.

Christians and Muslims (and the Zoroastrians before them) have historically aligned with the illusive dualistic view of Nature, seeing the world as a drama expressing the struggle of God against the Devil. Typically, in this world-view, you, are, yourself, God’s emissary, and your opponent, by default, becomes the Devil’s agent. Christians and Muslims have a long and terrible history of arrogant religious tyranny, oppression of differences, racist theology, and a hyper-polarized conformist ideology. (This structural fuel of duality is not just produced in religious thought. Communism, an atheistic theology, assures us, in a different diction, that communists work for God and capitalists work for the Devil. A different language but the same underlying mechanism.)

Christianity has had its reformation, and its separation of church and state. Islam is in desperate need of such a reformation if it is to evolve and experience a true life-cycle, rather than to remain situated at the edge of the moral world, desert-bound, it’s identity nested somewhat comfortably within the role of World-Destroyer, the crescent moon, the scythe, armed to try to kill the Day-Hero, who is the Devil in their anti-material theology.

To say that Christianity has had its reformation, is not to say that all is right and good with the Christian world. The most likely result of the shattering of the global economy will be a reconfiguration of political power in the world, similar to what happened in the 1930’s. Further polarization is guaranteed. Further manifestation of fundamental Christianity, or a form of it, is very likely, as the conventional morality of civilization breaks apart and racial, religious identity begins to form as an expression of the life-and-death emotion that lives in the heart of the primordial. Civil war in Europe, between Christian/Aryan elements against Muslim elements, is almost guaranteed.

Economic collapse ensures political transformations on a grand scale. The fracturing of the World-Egg will allow the new stage of the Divine Idea to be born, but on the other side of the Night Experience we are all currently entering.

This book will be, among other things, a prophecy of the coming events on the world political scene. The Western World, and its shadow, the global economy, is about to reap the Biblical whirlwind again. (I say ‘again’, because the Day and Night sequences of history come along at regular intervals, intervals that seem to be calculable also, and will continue to do so, apparently, until our universe disappears.)

In American politics, this current duality is expressed through the two forces of Republican and Democrat. The Republicans tend to see themselves as God’s party, the party of the Father, the party with Christian roots. Many Republicans (especially those with evangelical ties) tend to view liberal Democrats as agents of Satan, as agents of social license, political and moral decay, the party of homosexuality, drug use, broken families, witchcraft, willful degeneration – in essence, the party of the antichrist.

Many polarized Democrats, for their part, tend to view Republicans as soulless materialists, agents of patriarchal oppression, racists, militarists, fascists, perfectly willing and even eager to destroy Nature for the sake of personal, racial and national profit, using religion as a pretext for aggression, greed, selfish virtue, and mindless conformity to fundamental Christian doctrine.

Each of these views is accurate from its own perspective. Each is a half-truth. That is, an illusion.

The polarized nature can see only two of four moral dimensions of Nature: each can see their own virtue and their enemy’s vice. They cannot see, during their own period of emotionalized manifestation or polarization or incarnation, their own shadow, their vice, or the virtuous side of their enemy. These ‘other’ dimensions are very real also. The Republicans are good and bad, light and dark; the Democrats are the same, to put it in rather mundane terminology.

This partial picture of moral reality makes it possible for Republicans to hate Democrats and for Democrats to hate Republicans, for Muslims to hate and kill Christians, for Christians to hate and kill American Indians….as the wheel of karmic retribution goes round and round.

Duality is the engine of incarnation, and drives the manifestation of nature’s higher kingdoms (of which humanity is one part). It is also, as I have suggested, the motor of the Wheel of Karma, in the Asian theology, for incarnation is the stage upon and during which sins are committed through the agency of a desire for life, a desire for a separate existence, and a desire for power.

There would be a constant state of war (international and civil war) in the world of men if God had not also built in to this system (the Laws of Nature, which are both physical and metaphysical) a mediating Middle Principle which seeks to bring peace between the two animating polarities. In one human, social aspect, the Middle Principle is the Middle Class of a given society, situated between perpetual enemies, the rich and the poor, patricians and plebians, republicans and democrats, whites and blacks, men and women, north and south, east and west….

What is it Leonard Cohen sings?

There is a war between the rich and poor,

A war between the man and the woman.

There is a war between the ones who say there is a war

And the ones who say there isn't.

When the Middle Class is large and vital, this class acts as the creative principle of the society. The middle pillar, the middle class, as a kind of social organism, joins the rich when the power of the poor needs to be reduced, when the chaos of rebellion and resistance to order becomes too dangerous to the life of the society – and when the individual members of the middle class believe they can gain a more comfortable, secure life by joining the ruling class – when they get greedy. The middle class joins the poor when the power of the rich needs to be reduced (as we saw happen in 2008, with the election of Barak Obama), when the ruthless ‘survival of the fittest’ capitalistic, individualistic ideology turns a blind eye on the sufferings of the poor, and when capitalist greed sinks the boats of society, and endangers all its life-boats. When the individual members of the middle class dream about becoming rich, they join the ruling class politically, creating Republican rule; when they dream about becoming poor – which is the shadow side of the ‘American Dream’, the nightmare-side -- they join the working class politically, creating Democratic rule.

When there is no middle class, there is no creation in the society – the ‘water of life’ has been withdrawn from the system – and the two poles are fixed in deadly opposition and civil war. When there is no viable middle class, the society is essentially dead. It has lost its animating heart. Then there is no evolution. All that’s left is conflict, and, ultimately, the triumph of either the Fascist Father or the Communist Mother principles.

In a living society, the middle class (the mediating middle ‘Life’ principle – the Demiurgos in some mythologies) creates the Heavens and creates the Earth sequentially, by cycling (via the infamous Figure 8) both above and below, informing gods about the nature of Earth and informing men about the nature of the Heaven.

In one sense, this Middle Principle is a ‘mirror’ which kills or neutralizes the polarization of both Heaven and Earth by presenting a picture of the ‘virtuous side’ of the opposition to each of the polar opposites. It pictures ‘wholeness’, which kills the fragmented part it encounters, thereby educating it into a larger scale of perception.

We recognize this mediating middle principle in the intellectual mechanism (dialectics) by which opposites (Thesis and Antithesis) are synthesized into a new idea or entity incorporating, in itself, both views, ideas and values of the original polarity. The middle principle arms both sides with ideas they can use against the other, but always acts as a balance against too much power being gained by either side.

The clearest form of the manifestation of this Middle Principle in politics is democracy, in which system Right and Left wings of political power are held together as a unity by the informing Middle Principle which is Republican during the Day Period of political manifestation and Democratic during the Night Period of political dematerialization. The Middle Principle in a viable democracy keeps both sides from gaining absolute power. When either side gains absolute power, the society is no longer alive and evolving.

The Middle Principle, by educating and evolving both sides of the polarity, is Life, itself, whose behavior, thus, ensures the circulation of the life-force between the Head and the Body, between the North and South, between the Abstract and the Concrete Physical – between the East and the West, between Social Obligation and Individual Will -- much as the heart in the body circulates blood throughout the body, north and south and east and west.

The Middle Principle, the Soul, if the guiding force of evolution, educating the Body of Life during the Day-Cycle and educating the Mind of Life during the Night-Cycle. Material Science evolves; Spiritual Science also evolves. Each cycle is an attempt to update the world-form that preceded it, expand it, reconfigure it, and take it a step or two further. Science evolves; Religion evolves – but, without the Middle Principle, the Soul, nothing evolves, everything becomes frozen in time.

The discovery of antimatter in the 1930’s (the discovery of anything in science is almost always the work of many people spread over many years – so whether Paul Dirac or Carl David Anderson is given credit for the ‘discovery’ of matter’s magical mirror-world seems relatively inconsequential now) opened a new door to the scientific understanding of the nature of the universe, and the illusive quality of the nature’s duality. Anti-matter is a mirror-image of matter. An atom of matter is composed of a positive nucleus -- a positive proton and a neutral neutron -- and orbiting negative electrons. An atom of anti-matter is composed of a negative nucleus -- negative anti-proton and a neutral anti-neutron -- and orbiting positive anti-electrons. An atom of Hydrogen is mirrored by an anti-atom of anti-Hydrogen – although no one is really certain as to where this anti-atom of anti-Hydrogen may be hiding at any given moment.

If our physical universe is composed mostly of material atoms, is it not likely that antimaterial-atoms probably compose an anti-universe that ‘reflects’ our material universe? Even if we use this description only as a metaphor at this point, it is not painful on the imagination to see the Republican Party as the masters of the Material Universe and the Democrats as the anti-masters of the Anti-Material Universe.

I am not making value judgments about these different seasons and universes. As I have written, each universe has both a positive and a negative aspect. In a similar way, the North is the material world, and the South is the antimaterial world, with the magnetic field of perception reversing at the equator, which divides the Earth in to two equal halves. A metaphor of this ‘mirror reflection’ shows that water runs down a drain clockwise in the Northern Hemisphere, and counter-clockwise in the Southern Hemisphere.

When the ‘Ideal’ Republican raises his right hand, the ideal Democrat raises his left. To the Republican (especially as manifest through the so-called ‘Religious Right’ of fundamentalist Christians) white is good and black is bad. To the Ideal Democrat, black is good and white is bad. The dark-skinned (southern) races have been persecuted by the Christian-driven (northern) white races for so long that the ‘moral balance’ is now tipped toward the southern races for the sake of balance.

The Republican sees wealth as a sign of God’s personal reward. The Democrat is suspicious of wealth, and feels guilt associated with wealth, assuming that success in business is a form of successful corruption, which suggests a metaphorical ‘contract with the Devil’. The Democrat is against matter, against the corporation, which is a manifestation of the body-life. The Republican is for matter, for the corporation, for the body, as a manifestation of power in the world – and against spirit (or antimatter) as a manifestation of weakness, weak-willed female weakness, abstract weakness, poverty, death, darkness.

I am not suggesting that the atoms composing the poles of matter and antimatter are stationary and fixed. These poles evolve and change, as long as the middle principle exists and continues to educate the poles. The wheel turns and individual atoms ride the wheel into heaven and back down to earth.

The Republican becomes a Democrat; and a Democrat is transformed into a Republican. Evolution involves the weight of the fulcrum changing its orientation, tilting toward the Father or tilting toward the Mother.

Europe has tilted toward the Mother for many years now, since America has been willing to play the Father-Role for Europe (for American gain surely, not out of the goodness of our hearts). Now Europe will swing back toward the Father-Worship that got Europe in so much trouble 72 years ago. Recent European elections show that socialists are out of power now and center-right and far-right parties are gaining power in Europe, blaming immigrants for all their social problems. This is just the beginning. Europe will be fighting for her racial life, as Islam has moved in to Europe, threatening to throw its blanket of submission to Allah over the heads of European States and suffocate them with ideological righteousness – which is another form of fascism.

As Europe swings to the Father again, America swings back to the Mother. This happened in the 1930’s as well.

If this social metaphor I have introduced is an accurate picture of reality, then I would expect science to discover, at some point soon, the method by which the Middle Principle (composed of both matter and anti-matter) can ‘become’ matter at one phase and anti-matter at the next. In fact, in 2006, science did discover a particle, far smaller than any atom, that switches itself back and forth between being a piece of matter and a piece of anti-matter, 18 trillion times each second. The back-and-forth switching appears to be one of the fastest processes in nature.

In the world of mythology, Mercury was the messenger between the gods and men, carrying messages back and forth between Heaven and Earth. Mercury was associated in Western theology with Michael the Archangel; and Michael the Archangel was associated with Jesus Christ.

What does all this have to do with the collapse of the American-driven capital market system? And where is this collapse leading America, Europe and the world?

Those are questions we will examine as we progress through this book.

I am not of the opinion that the most recent collapse of the Republican-engineered global American Empire, and its form, the global economy, signals the end of the American empire and will propel America into the state of a lost nation or a second-rate power. Many wish for this. Many Europeans speak gleefully of this vision as a wish the result of which would catapult European nations back into a position of empirical rule and global dominance, something for which many of the European Ruling Class are pining, remembering the good old days of their own ‘unlimited wealth’ through oppression of Africans, Asians, South Americans and even North Americans. But history does not limp backwards. The days of European youth are gone. But Europe will play a large role in the coming apocalyptic events, which role I will consider later in this book.

This current economic collapse will last for many years and will dramatically alter the face of global political alliances and power. If there is any accuracy in the numbers I will introduce later in the book, this Great Depression will last until, approximately, the year 2019 and will be accompanied by earth-shattering wars and political re-alignments.

We need to understand that the current crisis is not primarily an economic crisis – the effect of the crisis is a collapse of the global economic system. What has caused this economic collapse is a spiritual crisis resulting in a loss of identity, as Western ego-inflation (in the words of Jungian analysts) has popped, deflated and entered the formless world of Night, or Material Darkness.

Economic depressions come regularly in the history of living human systems as the male identity (the ego) ‘dies’ or is defeated, turns inward and descends into the formless darkness of chaos and self-judgment in an attempt to gain self-understanding, peace and comprehension of the meaning of life – to find his God, in other words. The ego (now Non-Ego) also seeks in the Darkness the identity of its next incarnation, its next life, its next phase of bubble-creation. The convex bubble (extroversion) becomes a concave bubble (introversion), digging a hole in the inner nature similar in extent and opposite in moral dimension to the dome it has built in its previous Day-time incarnation. The Day-Ego builds a dome in the world of matter; and the Night-Anti-Ego builds an anti-dome in the world of antimatter.

In nearly every religious system, creation of the world begins with the breath of God. The Creative God(s) ‘breathes Life in to’ – i.e., blows a bubble -- in the fabric of eternity. This bubble becomes a separate particle of Time (a mortal phenomenon with a defined length of existence) inside of which, and through which, Life expresses itself, experiencing objectivity, until the innate alarm clock goes off and the particle bursts or collides with its opposite. The Male Expansionary Energy pops and vanishes into the Darkness, in much the same way that Icarus, after flying at the Sun, singes his wax wings and falls into the ocean. Death/Dissolution is a falling back in to the waters of the Unconscious. Day-Energy builds the positive world; Night-Energy builds the negative world, destroying the world that the Day-Energy has created.

This is the real cause of the collapse of the global economy. The alarm clock went off. Energy changed its form and direction. The Sun-Hero was wounded, fell back toward earth, and was transformed in to the Night. And now the mythological Darkness, the Power of Chaos, has taken control.

About times and dates, brothers, there is no need to write

to you for you are well aware in any case that the Day

of the Lord is going to come like a thief in the night.

It is when people are saying “How quiet and peaceful it is”

that sudden destruction falls upon them, as suddenly as labor

pains come on a pregnant woman; and there is no escape.

1 Thessalonians: 5: 1-3

What can we do about this?

Nothing really. We cannot ‘fix’ the problem. Only Time can fix the problem.

The Republican, masculine Day-Force, wants to ‘fix’ things. The Republican is essentially a Cowboy, an Engineer, a Problem-Solver. ‘Give me a problem to solve; and let’s keep it simple.’ In the (paraphrased) words of John McCain: ‘Let’s fight, fight, fight!’ Let’s fight chaos; let’s fight complexity; let’s fight pessimism. If we are willing to fight, we can overcome anything.’

This approach works wonderfully in the world of matter. But it does not work in the world of antimatter. Matter, rational coherence, male externalized energy literally disintegrates as it approaches the horizon of the black hole. Everything that worked for male energy in the Day Cycle tends not to work for male energy in the Night Cycle. There are new Laws of Nature in the anti-dome of antimatter, laws which are based on the laws of Metaphor and Analogy, not upon the Day-Nature laws of Cause and Effect. Day-Nature is measured from the outside; Night-Nature must be measured from the inside. Day-Nature measures from the outside in a controlled environment; Night-Nature measures from the inside with tools of metaphor, analogy, symbolism. The tools that work in the sunlight do not work in the moonlight.

The next decade promises to be very difficult; but it will also have its rewards. What can individuals do now? Each person must find his God – and seek to make himself Whole, make himself the Middle Principle. It is time to build an ark, to acknowledge the Moon as the counterpart of the Sun, to paint blood on the door, and to prepare for the Force of Death to pass over the world community once again. Fear of God is a good thing. Modesty is a positive value. Generosity and understanding and the community of shared suffering are virtues.

If there were only these two in the world – intellect and body –

but there were no soul, then the intellect would not be drawn to the

body (for it is entirely immobile and is not supplied with a principle

of movement, although it is far distant from the body), nor would the

body be drawn to the intellect since it is just as incapable and ineffective

in moving by itself, and is far removed from the intellect. But if soul

is interposed, conforming to both, there may be an easy attraction

from one to the other.

The Planets, Marsilio Ficino

CHAPTER TWO.

ANATOMY OF A CRIME

(A Lust for Life is Also A Fear of Death)

"We're breaking the law, okay? We're breaking the law.

You know we're breaking the law. I know we're breaking the law.

What the hell do you think is going on here? We're sitting on an Enron.

This is…bigger than Enron. I mean, we’re doing four billion a month in loans.

If housing drops, housing value drops, people start to default, you know?

This is a nightmare. These people will not survive it,"

Banker Paul Bishop to Executives at World Savings Bank

Can one speak of a ‘crime’ having been committed in the context of inevitability? Is there free will to act against the concords of one’s own nature? Is Fate absolute? Is Destiny a loose-fitted garment that allows the individual the authority to choose an act that deviates from the harmony of history, from the logic of the path of one’s own Destiny?

These are all large questions that have been debated for millennia.

The electron beam is destined by its momentum and by its very definition to act in a certain manner (the Laws of Nature). But the electron beam is composed of myriad electrons, each free to act according to its own persuasion, apparently, but also to be balanced by some other electron in the beam so that the destiny and definition of that electron beam is not violated. Destiny does not pick which electron seeks freedom and which electron exercises balance. Apparently there is chance, and, at the same time, there is necessity and order.

Is this a scientific model which describes a solution to the dilemma of human fate, destiny, and free will?

So, there was a crime committed. There were many crimes committed. Corruption is a loss of balance between ‘human nature’ and the laws that govern the boundaries of human nature. Many of the human laws that have been in effect since the Great Depression in the 1930’s and that were designed to limit the crimes of banks and businesses and to protect American consumers from commercial robbery were rigorously stripped away by Republicans and Democrats alike, Democrats falling in to line with Republican dogma which essentially turned over all business-related policy-making decisions to American business-leaders, the implication being that the ‘real world’ of material profit was really the only world that really mattered.

The ideology of the ‘rugged individual’ is the essence of modern republicanism: God rewards those who work hard, who innovate, who conquer the world; and those who don’t should (there was a moral imperative in all of this) be condemned to poverty and loss. Selfishness and ‘ego expansion’ (self-actualization) drive the world into the future and are the mark of society’s ‘winners’, risk-takers, evolutionary titans. It was manifest destiny on the psycho-sexual and economic planes. ‘Losers’ are those with too much conscience, too much modesty, too much subjectivity, too much introversion – not enough aggression, talent and ambition.

America, as a culture, has always had ultimate respect for ‘winners’, ambition, success. Losers were the shadow side of this bright light: lazy, shiftless, criminal, drug-addicted, stupid. For centuries these descriptions were generally reserved for the under-class of dark-skinned Americans: American-Indians, African-Americans, Latinos, Asians (although Asians did much through hard work and discipline to elevate themselves as a race of competitors, though mostly through the arts of mimicry and doubled or tripled effort)… American success was defined, as a reflection of the same European success and world-dominance, as the triumph of the White Race.

Expansion of the Ego separates the races into a hierarchy of values (‘colors’ as well as moral virtues), with Will, the Will to Success, the Will to Rule, the Will to be White, rising above all other values. The Ego is separated from the Shadow as the Individual Hero, the Ego, climbs the ladder of Power and takes his place in the Sun. And, certainly, there are many positive repercussions to this isolate Will climbing the ladder of success: climbing to power, ruling the world, bringing innovation, technics, new ideas, and prosperity with him.

The Sun Hero climbs out of Darkness and brings light and fertility to the whole world, warmth and expansion, wealth, cities, human culture. But there is a shadow-side also. Human pride, and Ego-inflation, result when the human being attempts to become a God, attempts to become the Human Sun, seeks to control the world, make it submit to his own will, as if he were God.

For this sin of human pride, Ego-Inflation, there is the punishment of Ego-Deflation, a kind of psychic or moral death, at which time the prideful human, having fallen from the realm of power and immortality, must face his own Shadow, must face his own sins, his human limitations, the small side of his own nature.

The sin or crime of Economic-Inflation results, ultimately, in Economic-Deflation. The Day of success, and wealth and power must become, in time, the Night of failure, poverty and recognition of one’s limitations.

Orthodox religion, by definition, has racist implications. The Light of Day, with its heavenly qualities, joy, security, wealth, power, fertility, the Triumph of Light over Darkness, in all cultures, represents God’s blessings. God is Light; and the Devil is Dark. By implication, God is White; and the Devil is Black. Humans in the grip of fundamental religious passion naturally associate color with theocratic structure. It is in their own interest to do this, for survival becomes an issue, survival of race, nation, family, self. In nature, light fights darkness; darkness triumphs over light; light triumphs over darkness.

Oddly, and this fact is very rarely recognized by fundamental/evangelistic Christianity, Christian tenets espoused by their founder, Jesus Christ, of peace, generosity, modesty, poverty, non-violence are ‘virtues’ typically possessed by the non-white ‘losers’, the shadows of the white-driven feeding-frenzy for moral absoluteness, material success and world domination. In fact, if I remember my Catholic litany of evils correctly: avarice, ambition, violence, greed for worldly power and status --the ‘peace and prosperity’ factor -- were considered evil values and indicated an alliance with the Devil. Worldly Power did not imply God’s blessing. Instead, worldly power and success implied God’s curse, and the Devil’s insidious contract with the lost soul.

In fact, the historical animosity between Christian and Muslim stems mostly from these opposite views as to the toleration of worldly values. The Muslim (especially Arab Muslim) has almost no generosity toward the Earth. As such, the Muslim tends to spread a desert wherever he goes. Muslims seem to view the brutalization of the woman as a positive virtue – linking the female and the earth. The lack of water (the desertification of the Earth), poverty, and the oppression of the female-shadow are all part of the same paradigm, no doubt. The hatred and mistreatment of Jews are also a part of this same thought-structure. But that is a theme that I will be looking at later.

I am writing, here, about perceptions, of course. The inability of the human being to see all four moral dimensions at the same time is a primordial limitation. The illusion that one is right, God-instilled, brings about war between the opposites and is the mechanism that drives history, as we have discussed. Here again, the world appears as the object and the anti-object, each a mirror-image of the other, seeking to kill out the evil Other it finds standing accusatorily before it, reflected.

Each two-dimensional perception is a half-truth. By the same token, each two-dimensional perception is a half-lie also, by mathematical necessity.

Humans labor in a vale of darkness. Sometimes we see the world not at all: everything is dark. When we see the world very clearly, with a bright light of understanding, we are most often, at this point, seeing but that half-truth that gives us security in identity: seeing what we need or want to see, for our own psychic or spiritual reasons. Only through complete detachment from both sides is clarity of vision possible. But clear-sighted detachment is also a stage, one that decays into a state of incarnation as the soul is thrust into action on the side of either the Earth or Heaven, on the side of either the poor or the rich, on the side of either the woman or the man.

We don’t wish to lose our focus.

The ‘Anatomy of a Crime’. A crime was committed. Many crimes were committed. Many trillions of dollars of global wealth were wiped out (some would say stolen) in a matter of months. Lives of millions of human beings were destroyed or at least significantly damaged in many countries throughout the world – in the blink of an eye. Retirement savings vanished. Frozen credit -- and absolute terror brought about by a failing financial system -- led to a constriction of the circulation of currency, causing death in the body politic. Millions of jobs were wiped away, creating a world-wide panic, which led to a further constriction of spending.

History will look at the Great Credit Crunch of 2008 as the greatest looting of private and public funds by officers of public corporations and by public officials in the history of the world. Wall Street has proven itself again to be a nest of vipers. The great Robber Barons of the nineteenth century – Rockefeller, Dale Carnegie, Jay Gould, J.P. Morgan, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Henry Frick, Edward Harriman – had nothing on today’s crooks, scammers and enablers: Christopher Cox, Joseph Cassano, Dick Fuld, Ian McCarthy, Stan O’Neal, Lewis Rainieri, Angelo Mozilo (who ‘earned’ over $400 in five years overseeing Countrywide Credit), Chuck Prince, Jimmy Cayne, Christopher Dodd, Ralph Cioffi, Matthew Tannin, Steve Crenshaw, Sir Fred Goodwin, Andy Hornby, Franklin Raines, Hank Paulson, George Bush, Phil Gramm, Bernie Madoff, “Sir” R. Allen Stanford, Bill Clinton, Kathleen Corbet, Marion and Herb Sandler, John Devaney, David Lereah, Ben Bernanke, David Oddson, Burton Jablin, Donald Trump, Paul Greenwood, Stephen Walsh, James Nicholson, Mark Bloom, Neal Kashkari (i.e., ‘Kneel; and Carry the Cash’). These are all people who helped to kill the golden goose that was laying millions of golden eggs for so many years so that we Americans (and many world citizens also) could live more comfortably if more dangerously indebted. But now the goose is dead. Wall Street is in ruins – and will remain a sewer in the minds of most Americans (a sewer designed for the interbreeding of rats) for many years to come.

‘Looting’ is defined by Nobel Prize winner George Akerlof and co-author Paul Romer as making loans ‘with a total disregard for even the most basic principles of lending…acting as if future losses would be someone else’s problems’ – which they have become, the problem of the taxpayer, through government (bank-engineered) bail-outs.

Even today, AIG, American Insurance Group, which received over $170 billion in taxpayer bailout money, announced intentions to pay executives $450 million, including bonuses of $165 million, this after announcing a loss of $61.7 billion for the fourth quarter of 2008, the worst corporate loss in history.

What is the difference between an AIG executive and a Mafioso? Not much apparently. Except the mafiosos don’t get to raid the national treasury when their bad judgment leads to a loss of their own money, humiliation and public disgrace.

The sad thing is that AIG is probably not much different than most international corporations. The anti-corporate mentality that manifested so potently in America in the last Ego-Deflation Night period (1965-1982) will return with a vengeance after this arrogant, callous looting of the public coffers by American businessmen and women (mostly men, in fact).

Of course, we have not mentioned Allen Greenspan with this group. If all the above (mostly white) men and (a few) woman were crew members on the Pequod, chasing the black gold trophy in the dangerous oceans of financial risk (and almost all using other people’s money to make themselves obscenely wealthy), the captain of the boat was Allen Greenspan, whose manipulation of the money supply and whose cheerleading for Americans to take on more and more (and riskier) debt makes one question either his sanity or his level of awareness/denial, or his honesty. Then, as though we might not notice, after stepping down as the Maestro at the Federal Reserve, Greenspan quietly slipped into a (one would assume) multi-million dollar annual salary working with John Paulson and his hedge fund that made some $4 billion dollars in 2007 by shorting the US mortgage market, which Dear Allen (‘call him Maestro, don’t call him Bob Cobb’) had helped to inflate to unsupportable levels. Talk about your conflict of interest.

One wonders if Allen may have been talking to that ‘other Mr. Paulson’ long before he stepped down as the Captain of the Pequod. (At least Ahab had the decency to go down with his whale, with his obsession. It’s a shame Allen Greenspan hasn’t had the decency to retire and write his memoirs, instead of continuing to be a kind of Janus player in the Age of Greed smorgasbord hereby recently discovered floating face-up. In fact, like Ahab, Allen is still clinging to his whale, the whale he helped to create, the whale which stove in his empire, stove in his reputation for integrity and ingenuity, rendering him now a smudge on History’s dirty apron, a smudge next to the smudge that once was Herbert Hoover, the man who ‘caused’ the last depression.

Since Americans tend to honor the rich, no matter how they become rich, the political incentive to put the crooks in jail for their crimes has not yet gained much momentum. We will tolerate a billionaire who steals an old women’s life savings in an investment scam, but we will insist that a poor man who steals bread for his family be put in jail immediately. That is an immorality that must be corrected in the American system of values – the adulation of winning at all cost, instead of the adulation of the human character. Nobility is greatness; wealth is not. Generosity and decency are real values; cheating to get ahead is a sin and will be punished by God as such. And that is what we are experiencing now. God is punishing us for our sins, for our greed, for our selfishness, for our lies and for our indecency.

Some individuals, admitting guilt or shame as a part of misdeeds revealed by the economic low-tide, have committed suicide: Adolph Merckle, a German industrialist, who bankrupted his industrial empire through investment mistakes; Kirk Stephenson, director of a London private-equity house; and Rene Thierry Magon de la Villehuchet, who lost his entire family fortune through mismanagement – i.e., through investing with Bernard Madoff, the New York City legend who was also, apparently, a fraud. Madoff apparently stole $50 billion in an elaborate investment scam from a many investors throughout the world, some his friends, even from his own sons. Mr. Madoff did not commit suicide. His name has now become synonymous with the great thieves in the history of the world. A Madoff Scheme (as in ‘I made-off with your money, ha-ha’) will become part of the world’s vocabulary, as Ponzi Scheme did in the Roaring 1920’s.

What caused this catastrophe?

The Housing Crash. Yes. The Great Housing Crash of 2007.

And the name of Alan Greenspan comes up automatically as a footnote or as a preface.

Alan Greenspan was, perhaps, the most powerful man in the world for nearly two decades, until his retirement in 2006. Greenspan was a devoted student of the causes of the Great Depression in the 1930’s, a devoted disciple of the ‘rugged individualism’ espoused by novelist Ayn Rand, and a favorite of Ronald Reagan, who appointed Greenspan as the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board in 1987.

What was Greenspan’s crime, Greenspan’s sin? To hear him tell the tale, in 2008, as he apologized, before a congressional committee, almost in tears, for his central role in the obliteration of the American Dream and the American capital system , he said simply: ‘I made a mistake.’ By this he seemed to mean that his mistake was his belief that the private business sector had the intelligence, wisdom and self-restraint to manage risk in a largely deregulated environment. Of course, Greenspan had been a prime mover in the ideology of business deregulation that had ruled America since Ronald Reagan came to power, a historical reaction to the anti-business years (i.e., pro-business regulation) of Democratic rule from John Kennedy through Jimmy Carter.

Alan Greenspan overrated the soul of the American (and Global) Business class. Alan Greenspan believed that, faced with a choice between an unrestricted greed that would lead to unrestricted profits but might imperil the life of the economic system and a restricted greed that would lead to restricted, but substantial, sustainable profits, the American ruling class would choose the responsible, sustainable path, the one leading to American and global prosperity for many generations to come. Instead, the Global Business Class, led by the American Ruling Class, chose unrestricted greed, madness, and, ultimately, self-destruction.

In some ways, Alan Greenspan was the embodiment of Gordon Gecko, the financial land-shark, in Oliver Stone’s monumental movie, Wall Street. Gecko tells a group of shareholders: ‘Greed – for lack of a better word – is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all its forms – greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge, has marked the upward surge of mankind. And greed – you mark my words – will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA.’

A half truth again, which looked pretty good in 2004 but looks rather empty now in 2009.

America is not a corporation. A society is not a corporation. Making money is not the goal of life; money is a necessity that allows us to live comfortably; but money is not the ultimate of Life. And because we forgot this truth, God is now punishing us. And God will punish us some more until at least 2019.

Materialism has no soul – that is, the soul exists but the body dominates the soul. Materialism does not respond readily to moral codes and ethical restrictions unless it is required to do so by legal implications. Afterall, the Business Class hires lawyers and pays them terrific amounts of capital each year to instruct that Business Class how to bend the laws without breaking them, how to break the laws without getting caught. If that were not enough, the Business Class ‘inspires’ lawyer-politicians in the government (how are campaign contributions repaid?) to pass laws that make it easier for business to cheat and steal without breaking the law. It’s a good system set up for the American Ruling Class, lawyers, and our politicians in Washington and in every state, county, and city in America. Everyone gets rich. It’s all good. It’s a win-win situation apparently.

The idealism of Materialism is to get rich -- to get rich, without going to jail or getting killed by competitors in the process. Laws protect the Business Class from getting killed by their competitors. Lawyers protect the Business Class from going to jail, by providing them loopholes in the law. In fact, the basis of the legal profession is to serve the rich with labyrinthine legal maneuvers designed to neutralize or outflank laws designed to require more ethical business relations. Check out lawyers’ fees lately? Who can afford to pay a lawyer today but the rich and the super-rich?

Clearly, I am presenting the negative view of the Business Culture at this point. I am aware of, and I will also present later, the positive view of the Business Culture.

Greenspan’s real crime was philosophical – and psychological. He, and many other academic economists, devoted huge amounts of time, energy and intellectual resources to the proposition that the so-called Great Depression, which ran from 1929 through 1947 (some say 1942), was not inevitable, and was avoidable. If the Federal Reserve and American financial institutions at the time had only been more skilled in denial, had flooded the system with liquidity, then the Great Depression could have seen avoided. Death could have been cheated. Hadn’t the Business Class already proved that taxes were not inevitable? Why couldn’t they show the same about death, and the death of an idea?

This was a philosophic flaw in Mister Greenspan’s set of principles.

The flaw is the misunderstanding of the nature of ‘positive energy’ factor – the energy to build – which Greenspan apparently felt was eternal and inexhaustible, and his belief that the ‘negative energy’ factor, the Night – the energy to disembody or to de-construct -- could be avoided, ignored, or simply negated by an excess amount of positive energy, literally, by flooding the financial system with liquidity.

Of course, the Bible teaches us that too much liquidity led to the Flood, the Deluge, to the destruction of the world, and to Noah’s lonely survival on the top of Mount Ararat.

Biblical writing can be understood on many levels. But Biblical writing is very rarely literal, except in its advocation of moral principles. The world was not created in seven days, except in the symbolic sense: seven periods of creation, stretching over unimaginable millennia. Ask any serious Jewish scholar and none will claim the Seven Days of Creation describe ‘creationism’ in seven literal days. Only fundamental Christian insist on a literal reading of a symbolic literature.

To understand symbolic writing, the poetic mind is necessary – the dream mind – the literal, scientific, rational mind cannot comprehend symbolic writing. The poetic mind is almost always lost with mathematics and the scientific process. Likewise, the scientific mind often struggles with myth. The Day misunderstands the Night; the Night is beleaguered to comprehend the Day.

Also, the symbolic truth embedded in religious or mythical or mystical writing is timeless, like the dream is timeless. This timelessness makes the symbolic message illuminatory for all time, including the Present Time in which we currently live. Scriptural writing, and its underlying symbolic meaning, was written, not merely for the historical time of its composition, but also as a kind of psychic map for humans living at all times. Symbolic writing, describing eternal spiritual dilemmas, is a guide for spiritual survival that is as compelling and as relevant to yours and my quest today as it was to King David or to Moses in Biblical times.

Spiritual writing is a biography of the soul.

Eternal truths tell us about our lives, about the eternal parts of our own lives, today. The Flood is not just about Noah and his Ark in ancient myth – it is about us today. Nuah (the original of Noah) was a Chaldean word meaning ‘Spirit’; the Ark was a glyph for the Moon, as the Moon was symbolic of the Womb, in which the Spirit took refuge when the emotional element (Water) of Chaos and Night replaced the intellectual element (the Fire) of Order and Day – when the world ‘fell’ into the Chaos of the Flood, as we are falling into Chaos today.

Noah (Spirit) hid in his Ark (‘argha’ in Egyptian is the crescent moon) while the Darkness of Chaos destroyed the Material World. At the end of the destruction, Noah was re-born, was delivered back in to Life, the new prototype from which human evolution was patterned.

We cannot avoid the Night, the depression, simply by pretending it is not a part of the equation. By choosing Life in the World we also choose Death. By choosing to fly high, we also choose to fall deeply. By choosing to be rich, we also choose to be poor. By choosing inflation of the Ego, we also choose deflation of the Ego and all the suffering and death which goes with the death of a personality we have created.

There is a Middle Path, which is not so rich, and not so poor, not so strong, and not so weak, not so bright, and not so dark – but we have not chosen that path.

Greenspan, after the dot-com bubble burst in 2001, lowered interest rates to flood the system with capital to avoid the necessary Winter season in the economic expansion. Greenspan lowered rates to try to fight off economic death or descent. In the process, he helped to ignite a furious national and international housing price bubble. Exotic mortgages created by bankers and brokers on both Wall Street and Main Street, which essentially allowed unqualified home buyers with little or no money to buy houses they could not afford, also fueled the boom. Investment banks then helped further inflate the bubble by issuing even more exotic mortgage bonds that wrapped together high-risk and low-risk mortgage loans (in an attempt to neutralize the suspect loans), which they then sold to banks and other institutions all over the world as investment-grade instruments, which the rating institutions did not know how to grade, and which seemed stable and profitable as long a housing prices kept rising….

But what rises also falls.

As home prices fell, mortgage defaults rose. Banks holding the new breed of mortgage bonds did not even know how much risk they had assumed, because different grade mortgages were all bound up together, low-risk paper with high-risk paper.

The banking system began to implode.

Greed had trumped good judgment; and now default and bankruptcy were going to trump the seductive intoxication of a bull market in housing and the pure blue sky of Greenspan’s ‘free market’ religion.

The economic catastrophe was further exasperated in 2007-8 by a decline in the U.S. Dollar which fueled a wild spike in commodity prices, a third major bubble that formed under the Greenspan-Bernanke watch. (Bernanke was a ‘good son’ of Greenspan, from the same school of thought, continuing the old man’s prescient policies.) Oil shot up from $60 to $150 dollars a barrel. All major commodities followed this oil spike: copper, wheat, corn, gold, silver, aluminum, titanium, heating oil, natural gas. Commodity-heavy indexes and hedge funds spiked. Suddenly Canada, Russia, Australia, and other commodity-heavy economies were markets at which professional investors threw money. But the price of doing business for almost all other businesses escalated dramatically. Companies, already hurt by frozen credit-lines attendant to the banking crisis, now had to deal with escalating materials prices. American consumers, reeling from a popped housing bubble, now sagged under the heavy burden of skyrocketing gas and fuel prices.

In June 2008, the dollar reversed, as investors sought quality paper in response to the global banking crisis; and this flight to quality burst the commodity bubble. (So much for the theory of supply and demand regulating the marketplace. Speculators had created a demand in commodities as a response to a declining U.S. Dollar. But now the giants in investment-banking and hedge funds got caught in their own trap, as the unexpected return flight to the dollar destroyed overnight their huge profits in commodities.)

A deflating stock market, a deflating housing market, and a deflating commodity bubble cut trillions of dollars out of the global economy in a matter of months. This was just the beginning. Decades of price inflation and wage deflation had created a top-heavy tower that was crashing. The unwinding of debt wil take a generation to be accomplished.

Watching the collapse of the global capital markets each day on television and through the internet was a bit like watching the attack on the Twin Towers in New York City in 2001, and the subsequent de-materialization of the two buildings: there was nothing anyone could do. The world was set on fire. People were jumping out of windows. There were enemies of civilization behind each attack. The Muslim enemies of America knew they had attacked the Twin Towers; but the men (mostly white men, bankers and businessmen) who had attacked the global banking system really did not realize what they had done. That was the difference.

Masters of the Universe Greenspan, Bernanke, Paulson, and their cronies at Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, AIG, Countrywide Credit, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, had torpedoed the very ship they supposedly loved and had served much of their lives. They had slipped a Trojan Horse into the banking system. All in the name of a few more million dollars, a few more houses for their families, a few more luxury cars and yachts. There is never enough money. There is never enough power. There is never enough status.

These men will live in History’s Hall of Infamy for having destroyed the lives of millions of people across the globe, and for having shamed America and America’s reputation as the leader of the Free World.

These men betrayed their own way of life and their own people without really being cognizant of what they were doing. At least the Muslim terrorists who attacked America in 2001 had the self-awareness of understanding they were trying to destroy America. The Muslim terrorists failed badly at their goal, although they did inflict impermanent damage on the psyche of the country. But the American terrorists, the bankers and the greedy mortgage agents, inflicted a mighty wound to the American psyche, one from which it will take a generation or more to recover.

Greed knows no honor.

For this is the Day of the Lord

Yahweh Sabaoth,

A day of vengeance

When He takes revenge on His foes:

The sword will devour until gorged,

Until drunk with their blood,

For Lord Yahweh Sabaoth

Is holding a sacrificial feast

In the land of the north

On the River Euphrates.

Jeremiah 46:10

CHAPTER THREE.

WHY WE NEED DEFLATION

(The Winter is a Season of both Death and, later, Regeneration)

It didn’t have to be this way. The big mistake, in my view, came when the Fed condoned the equity bubble in the late 1990s. It has been playing post-bubble defense ever since, fostering an unusually low real interest rate climate that has led to one bubble after another. And that has given rise to the real monster -- the asset-dependent American consumer and a co-dependent global economy that can’t live without excess US consumption. The real test was always the exit strategy."

Stephen Roach, ‘The Test’

Deflation is a necessary season in the economic cycle. Deflation is the necessary contraction phase, and helps to balance the excesses fueled by the principles and energies of expansion. Deflation modifies prices that have escalated during the expansion phase of the cycle. These two forces – Inflation and Deflation – work together, as Day and Night work together, as Man and Woman work together. They only appear to be adversaries. Their adversarial relationship – like the relationship of Republican and Democrat – creates, in fact, a unity of motion. Centrifugal motion pushes energy outward from the center of a system; centripetal motion pulls energy from the periphery back to the center.

The U.S. government had been telling the American citizen for several decades now that there is no inflation in the American economy.

Of course, Americans know this isn’t true. Oil prices rose from $15/barrel to $150/barrel in twenty years. Housing prices jumped 150-500% is three years, after averaging an appreciation of 2.5% per year over a century. Health care costs explode year after year, averaging 9.5% growth, year-over-year for the last decade. The cost of college tuition has gone up by almost 1000% in thirty years. And we are told that there is no inflation.

It finally became clear to me, after years of musing on this phenomenon, that, there is no inflation, according to government statistics, as long as there is no wage inflation. And there has been little wage inflation – that is true. As long as wages stay low and do not chase the escalating costs of goods and services – and this is almost possible if the cost of credit stays low -- then the inflation spiral is muted. Of course, the consumer, in this scenario, becomes more and more indebted through this method of paying for myriad inflationary goods and materials. Apparently there is no moral dilemma in this. Business profits grow, wages remain low, and workers take on more and more debt. It sounds to me like a volcano that is bound to blow. But what do I know? I’m not an economist. Sometimes logic is only logic for those not sophisticated enough to know the difference between appearance and reality.

Of course, consumers were able to offset stagnant wage growth in the last few decades because of the impressive stock market gains (the first bubble to pop). The stock market became a second source of income for American consumers, to help pay for ever-increasing costs, children’s education, first, second or even third homes. But then the stock market flattened out after 2001, moving sideways for a few years, eliminating wall street as a guaranteed source of secondary income.

Consumers were then forced to borrow against the equity of their homes, as the housing bubble took hold – via Mister Greenspan’s steady hand -- once the stock market bubble played out. Of course, the housing bubble, again, increased American consumers’ indebtedness – forcing them to essentially withdraw savings from their own mortgage equity – in order to pay for the rising costs of health services, food, transportation, energy, education. As long as home prices continued to soar, the system seemed fine. Refinancing meant Americans could continue to draw on their increasing real estate wealth.

Of course, this paper wealth was being fueled by a dubious policy of serial bubble-creation that cheapened real money and turned millions of Americans (and world citizens as well) into credit-slaves and credit-junkies. The dogma of unlimited growth and unlimited wealth was being bruited about by the same bankers and financiers – and Fed Chairmen and Treasury Secretaries and U.S. Presidents -- who were laying the groundwork for the destruction of America and Europe, and all the other ‘emerging’ nations of the world that could not wait to jump on this miraculous bandwagon of capitalism.

Charts of debt accumulation by American consumers shows pretty clearly that phantom inflation of prices was accumulating on American’s credit card accounts.

Another way in which Americans sought to keep up with the accelerating cost of living was to have both parents working. Of course, women’s liberation doctrine called upon women to pursue careers in the real world and diminished the role of women as home-makers and child-rearers. But most Americans were not influenced by this radical ideology of gender equality. Most Americans were influenced by the need for two incomes to try to keep up with escalating prices.

There was, of course, a dramatic and negative reaction in the society to this ‘careerizing’ of the American family. Divorce became the norm, drug-use accelerated, crime increased, delinquency became pandemic.

Many readers will argue that America is the greatest country in the world, the richest, the freest. But something is wrong in America. We are building prisons are a rapid (inflationary) rate. The number of incarcerated Americans has increased 960% since 1950. Two in three marriages fail. Our children are taking guns to schools and shooting fellow students. Everything is not right in America.

More cheerleading of America, more honoring of Donald Trump as a hero (and many other entrepreneurs), more ‘keep government out of business’ slogans will not address America’s social decline. Much of this decline of the family comes from the inflation of costs of materials and services in the American economy, bubbles created by Mister Greenspan for the sake of corporate profit and corporate expansion and the resultant extraction of women out of the homes to chase wages in order to salvage the families’ economic integrity.

Loans, second and third jobs, refinancing of mortgages, dependence upon an inflated stock market, credit card abuse….these led to a consumer that was overextended and susceptible to bankruptcy should any of these currents of equity dry up suddenly. Now, it seems, every current of emergency money has begun to dry up at the same time.

With the saving rate at historic lows, most Americans are one or two paychecks away from bankruptcy and a life on the streets as a homeless statistic.

Republicans make icons of the concepts of individualism and national patriotism. Democrats sing the praise of the so-called international community. To Republicans, the ideal of Globalism – and we should not forget this – was and is tied to the goal, in American if less-so in Europe, of controlling business costs by driving down wage demands through the destruction of the power of Western labor unions.

‘Globalism’ was a positive-spin-word for maximizing profits by exporting high-wage jobs to third-world countries, first Mexico and South America, and then to Asia, transforming these high-wage jobs to low-wage jobs, without benefits. The corollary piece of this puzzle was to maintain the First-World’s role and even duty (and I use this word with care) to consume manufactured goods as a means of helping to sustain international economies, despite decreasing wages, but through cheap credit. It was the duty of Western nation citizens to consume globally-produced goods in order to sustain the Western way of life, with its high standard of living, despite the fact that living thus drove the Western consumer toward a condition of credit serfdom in modern, plastic society. No one thought much about debt. As long as matter expanded, and the future was bright, everything would be fine. And wouldn’t matter always expand?

Of course this was ‘all good’ for business.

Sometimes, what’s good for business is not good for American citizens. The ‘free-market’ idea, which has controlled America since 1982, has run its course. We are beginning to see the underside of this doctrine. The ‘free-market’ system is very good for the owners of businesses – but it is not so good for the workers.

Sometimes what is good for American business is not good for citizens of the world. Walmart has a dismal record all over the world for abusing its workers through low wages and insubstantial or no benefits. In China, Honduras, Sri Lanka, and other countries, workers are required to work long hours (8AM to 10PM), 7 days a week, 365 days a year for less than $3 a day. A toy that Americans buy at a U.S. Walmart store costs $14.96 but only costs Walmart 18 cents to manufacture, because of its mistreatment of workers in China. This is immoral. This is un-Christian. Walmart shames every American citizen by exporting such shameless behavior in the name of American Capitalism. American business is supposed to be showing the world the right way to do business, not generating hatred and bad feeling in the name of American Exploitation.

Walmart is also notorious for its shark-like business plan designed to destroy local small businesses competitors in towns all over America, and all over the world, through an enforced low-price merchandise built on the backs of low wages and and poor or nonexistent benefits for Walmart workers. This lack of conscience and human exploitation is not a legal right; and it should be corrected through government legislation. This is an example of why and how the government must legislate business. Business will not do the right thing by its workers unless it is forced to do so by the weight of the law.

A government that refuses or is unable to protect its working class from plantation capitalism will fall to a revolution. It is in the best interest of all classes in a society to support fair and honorable treatment of all of its citizens.

Generally speaking, the rich get rich by cheating and stealing. We should not forget this.

Money is not the root of all evil; but the love of money is the root of all evil.

Bill Gates is one of the richest men in the world; and he has given more than 50% of his wealth to charitable organizations. The Walton family (Walmart owners) are perhaps the richest family in the world; and they have given less than 1% of their wealth to charitable organizations.

A famous American shoe company that makes a designer sneaker could export all production jobs to Asia, pay relatively unskilled workers about $2.25 a day to manufacture these sneakers, export the shoes back to American, European or Japanese markets for pretty impressive profits. The production cost per shoe might be $3 a pair in Vietnam (labor and material) and might sell for $250.00 in First World markets. That’s a pretty impressive mark-up.

Now, one argument companies might make as the logic of exporting jobs to low-cost markets is this: a company able to make shoes (or any product) much more cheaply through foreign production, could lower domestic costs of the manufactured goods. This does make sense logically. But that’s not how it has worked. Business has been able to win on both ends, with both decreased costs and with increased profits. Why? Because consumers have tended to view credit as money-in-their-pockets instead of a hand-cuff on their wrists. (In fact, it’s much closer to the latter than it is to the former.)

When I was a child in 1966, my father bought me a new pair of Chuck Taylor Converse All-Star sports shoes each year so I could play basketball. These athletic shoes were the best that money could buy at the time; I think these shoes cost about $3.50 a pair. If we compare a current cost of Nike Air Jordan shoes today ($250) with my old Chuck Taylor Converse All-Stars -- the best sports shoes on the market in their day -- we see that prices have inflated some 7000%. My father worked for the Sinclair Oil Refinery in Sinclair, Wyoming as an office manager (Payroll, Human Resources, Accounting, et.). I can’t imagine he was paid more than $15,000 in 1966 (and that may be high). The inflation rate implied in this example suggests that my father would need to be making $1,056,428.57 today, against $15,000 in 1966.

I admit that this example is somewhat self-serving. You can argue that quality of product is much higher today, that raw costs have gone up. Labor costs, in this example, have not gone up however. I will give other examples later in this book that will show clearly that we have just passed through a devastating inflationary cycle – one that has largely been ignored by governments and economists -- from which we are only now beginning to unwind, with the deflationary spiral that has just begun in 2007.

When I was growing up, I idolized Willie Mays. He was the greatest all-around baseball player I ever saw (ahead of Robert Clemente by a fraction). I remember all the excitement about Willie Mays becoming the first major league baseball player ever to break the $200,000 salary barrier. He never did. His highest payday was in 1971, when he earned $180,000. Not bad for a kid from Mobile, Alabama, growing up in a racist country, playing a little boy’s game for much of his life.

Mays could hit for average, hit for power, run, field, throw – he was one of the best defensive centerfielders of all time. He is in the Hall of Fame and will probably be considered by History to be one of the greatest all-around baseball players of all time, if not the best.

Ok, now for the ‘inflation’ story.

Manny Ramirez is a very good hitter today, a clutch hitter, who does not field well, does not run well. In fact, Manny is a liability defensively. He doesn’t have range to get to balls, he doesn’t have grace when he does get to balls, and his throwing arm is mediocre. He’s slow. Willie Mays stole 338 bases in his career; Manny has stolen 37.

Manny has a higher career batting averge than Willie Mays (.314 versus .302). Willie stayed in the league a few too many years; this dragged his batting average down. Willie hit 660 homeruns in 22 years. Manny has hit 527 in 16 years. It is doubtful that Manny will pass Willie’s homerun total (Manny has averaged only 19 homeruns his last three seasons). Manny would need to play almost 7 more seasons and hit 20 homeruns each year to pass Willie’s 660.

Manny will not every be considered one of baseball’s greatest all around players and I doubt he will be elected to the Hall of Fame – although he is a great natural hitter and ha given his teams good play and offensive firepower, as well as reasons to complain with pretty regular bouts of laziness and leadership problems.

Willie Mays made $180,000 in 1971, when he was the best baseball player in history (or one of the best).

Manny Ramirez recently signed a $25 million contract to play for the Los Angeles Dodgers in 2009.

I have nothing against a man getting what he can in this life. But don’t tell me there is no inflation. Manny is making 125 times what Willie Mays made in 1971. Manny Ramirez isn’t worth what Willie Mays was making. (And now Manny has been suspended for 50 games in the 2009 season for testing positive for drug use.)

By example, an engineer making $35,000 in 1971 would need to be making $4,375,000 dollars today to keep up with the inflation rate suggested by the inflation of Mays/Ramirez acceleration of major league baseball players salaries.

As I have suggested, the reason there was ‘no statistical inflationary pressure’ in America for the last two decades is because the statistics are stacked to overweight the wage inflation component. There are several reasons for this, a primary one being American business has been scrambling to export jobs to low-wage countries and destroy American unions in the process. I am not necessarily pro-union. I understand the hostility to unions in the business world; and I also understand that mafia involvement with unions in the 1970’s helped to destroy the integrity and decency of unions. But I also understand that without a prosperous working class in developed countries there will be no prosperity in the world economy – there will be no one to buy all these ‘wonderful’ products the world economies are producing.

China and India are supposed to pick up the consumer demand, as demand falls in America, Europe and Japan. That is the ‘global market’ company line. So far, China and India are leading the world into depression. Do we really think China and India will have the consumer spending power to lift the world back up after it has fallen down? And will China and India have the political stability to make all this occur? I think not. Civil unrest in both countries seems highly likely as prosperity vanishes and governments (and the business elite) are blamed for this.

There is nothing immoral in profit. Without profit a business cannot survive, cannot employ citizens, cannot pay taxes that help the government provide public services. With significant profit, a company can expand, can hire more people, and can become even more successful and pay more taxes (although, businesses pay billions each year in lawyer’s fees to avoid paying a fair share in taxes), and can produce more goods, keeping the costs of their products more affordable for consumers. That is the theory.

However, there is a problem with this theory. Too much capacity, too many goods produced, tends to drive down the price of the product. Too much supply is a problem for business. Too much oil drives down the price of oil products. If the number of vacuum cleaners produced cannot be absorbed by the market at a given price, then prices almost always come down to encourage distribution of the product. So there is a built-in self-serving limit to expansion. There are ways around this problem, but production cut-backs (and worker lay-offs) are a popular response. Escalating profits that cannot be ploughed back in to the business (for fear of over-production) often are used produce conglomerate companies and are ploughed back into salaries and bonuses of CEO’s and company officials. It is obscene to watch banks and financial institutions being given billions of taxpayer money by their pal Hank Paulson from the U.S. Treasury (who is supposed to be serving the American public), while salaries rise and huge bonuses are paid to the very people who engineered their own companies’ bankruptcies.

In fact, this is worse than obscene; it is criminal. The 1920’s in America had their Robber Barons. The rescued bankers, mortgage brokers, financiers and insurance men in 2008 – the worst and the greediest on Wall Street, and their cronies in government – should be heading to prison instead of heading to the government welfare banquet.

Republicans, especially those wearing evangelistic colors, the Rush Limbaugh and the Sean Hannity variety, have accused Democrats and liberals of raising the ‘class warfare’ flag whenever an increased tax rate on rich Americans is suggested. In fact, the Republicans and their Business Culture have been waging class-warfare on the working poor in America for the last three decades, through the destruction of labor unions and the export of high-paying manufacturing and industrial jobs. It is shameful to hear Republican supporters of this top-down class-warfare policy now raise the specter of bottom-up class-warfare only after they have been waging and winning the class war for a quarter of a century. The Republicans (capitalists) have no problem with class warfare, as long as they are winning the class war.

The rich, in American, should be paying higher taxes. In fact, the rich have a moral obligation to help their fellow Americans now, especially after the rich had such a free hand for decades to profiteer locally and globally and, also, have played such a pivotal role in destroying the American financial structure which is driving many middle-class families into poverty and many poor in to deeper state of financial despair.

The Judeo-Christian God honors generosity, kindness, mercy, charity even more than He honors selfish acquisition, avarice, pride, status, and covetousness of neighbors’ wives and goods.

Something is going on here, Mister Jones – and you better find out what it is.

I repeat: I am not necessarily pro-union. I am not anti-business. Ecclesiastes understood the Wheel of Time, how each polarity is a season in the whole round. Each ‘virtue’ or necessity rules in and for its own time, and then recedes, like the tide.

Free the Ego – the Practical Man -- during the Day (the Day is the vertical axis of the cross, the North-South orientation) to expand the economy, and to re-create the bubble of affluence. The Cowboy rules the Day, with its Individualism, its Business Culture, its ‘Greed’. The Indian rules the Night (the horizontal axis of the cross, East-West orientation) with its emphasis upon the internal and local, peace, sharing, and the life of the group, the life of the soul.

Death and Depression, the coming in of the economic and spiritual Darkness, the fall of Man from his throne of power and wealth, involves the cutting off of extremes: the high are lowered and the low are raised up, all being pulled into the ark, in a metaphorical sense, all being transformed into the Middle Principle in an attempt to ride out God’s destruction of the world. And that is the real sense in which the ‘meek’ (or the ‘modest’ – those who are ‘whole’) inherit the Earth.

We need the cycle of deflation (the Dark season) as much as we need the cycle of inflation (the Light season). The crime that the American Ruling Class committed (with their helmsman Mister Greenspan) was to curse the Night and to try to make believe it would not come if they merely pretended it wasn’t part of the reality.

It is very understandable why the Ego tries to build intellectual systems that reject death. The whole expansion of the economy is a response to the fear of death and to the conflict set up at Dawn which allows the Light to rise and forces the Darkness to fall. The desire for Life (the fear of Death) is the animating force of all creation.

All spiritual thought stems from a fear of Death and an attempt to understand why Death was added to the equation of Life. Death is darkness, the tragic overtaking the heroic. If the mind can create a mathematic trick which excludes Death from the picture – such as forced liquid-ization of the economy, in the sense of flooding the economy with cheap money, not in the sense of forced selling of property to cover debts, which comes later -- then we could all live for ever. Alan Greenspan, and his colleagues, thought they had done exactly that. Inflate the universe for ever: inflate, re-inflate, re-inflate, re-inflate…. Some physicists even have argued that the universe expands and will continue expanding for ever.

But, apparently, one form of liquidation inevitably leads to the other form of liquidation.

Also, there is a karmic debt that attaches to each inflation, as there is an economic debt that attaches to each economic inflation. And the longer the inflation goes on, the more debt that is taken on, the longer will be the period of deflation during which that karmic and economic debt are unwound.

In words that might appeal to the Republicans (I have written that I am both a Republican and a Democrat – in fact, I am also an Independent), God is a banker and he gives us credit, packets of Light, if you will. But, in the contract we sign when we take on this loan from God we also are told that we will have to pay God back. Deflation is the nature of Humanity giving back energy to God.

The Darkness in Human Society – poverty, despair, hopelessness, tragedy – is the process by which Humanity is drawn back to God. ‘Falls off its high horse’ might be another way of expressing this metaphor.

The ‘winners’ we love so much in American society, the heroes, the conquerors, the successful and rich, the famous, the stars, the beautiful people, are those who are farthest from God. We look at the ‘winners’ in our society, and what do we see? We see – along with mansions, expensive cars, glamorous vacations and sophisticated friends and entertainment -- divorce, addiction, crime, perversion, excess, loneliness, often early death, sometimes suicide. The ‘winners’ in human society, the rich, the powerful, the famous, are often ‘the losers’ before God calls them home again. The ‘winners’ are Icarus before he falls. The ‘losers’ are Icarus before he flies.

Psychological or Spiritual Deflation is the means by which God throws a human being to his knees.

Economic Deflation is the means by which God throws a society to its collective knees.

Deflation is not the end of life. Inflation, in fact, is the end of life,.

Most world cosmologies begin with God ‘breathing life’ into the world. But God also breathes life out of the world.

To ‘expire’ means to breathe out, to dig a hole in space and create a bubble that, ultimately, cuts one off from his source, the common fabric of life. This describes the inflation process. ‘Expire’ also means to die, of course. ‘Inspire’ means to draw breath in, to call souls back home from the burst bubble of isolated experience. ‘Inspire’ also means to fill oneself with excitement, knowledge, and revelation.

Deflation is closer in time to the beginning of life, the seed, the root, whereat and wherein the human soul becomes a child again, meek with lost pride, with fear and hope and vulnerability all mixed together. Deflation brings back community, and brings a human soul back to its roots, racial, national, and cosmic roots, back to the origin of its existence.

The Ego does not need God. The Ego believes he is God, standing alone above life, above God, above the mass, the king of the hill, a star centered in its own firmament. Ahab, in Melville’s masterpiece, Moby-Dick is the ultimate Ego confronting the world as a demi-god.

Misters Greenspan, Paulson and Bernanke and all their friends in Washington and on Wall Street were kings of the world (they apparently called themselves ‘The Masters of the Universe’ – Greenspan’s nickname was ‘the Maestro’ -- graced by God, each a Sun in his own system. Who, given such a high state, such grand power, a god ruling over men, would accede quietly to the regular, cyclic loss of power that the Night was demanding? Who would willingly climb down from a omnipotent throne and fall to his knees and proclaim: ‘God, you are higher than I! Your will is my will!’

To the minds of America’s Ruling Class, Deflation was not God. In fact, deflation was the Devil – as to Ahab, Moby Dick was the Devil. Death was a Devil that needed to be fought, needed to be resisted, needed to be defeated! Perhaps technology could defeat the Devil! Perhaps semiconductors might do it! (Even better: perhaps Viagra could do it.) Perhaps Death was just a trick of accounting, something we could take off the books – with everyone looking in the other direction (in the direction of their own self-interest), perhaps no one would even notice that Greenspan had erased Death from the Cosmic ledger.

People (nearly everyone) would get richer and richer and we would sail off into the sunset on our collective Ted Hood Yacht. Perhaps, together, the Great Society of Individuals, could kill the Great White Whale of our finiteness. Perhaps we were the generation God had willed to finally destroy that form of spiritual Gravity which transformed Hope to Despair, which transformed Victory to Defeat, which annihilated Beauty and Bodily Power and terminated Youthful Dreams, and was the tragic denouement of every play and every existence ever writ!

And perhaps not.

We need deflation; and we need inflation. Deflation saves human souls from their isolation, from their self-love, from their manic disease of pride and inhuman will. Inflation saves human souls from their self-loathing, from their lost direction, and from their lonely descent into failure.

The Night is not only our primal enemy; the Night is, at the same time, our primal spiritual regenerator. The Night is death, but it is also peace, and the source of our Wisdom. The Night is terror, but it is also our comfort, our rest. The Night makes us small again, but it also gives us dreams, which resuscitate us, and carry us back in to the light, allowing us to become large again.

Material wealth is not the only treasure in life. Material wealth allows us to become gigantic individuals but it also forces us to become demonically isolated and dangerous. Material possessions separate us from life – giving us freedom to pursue our dreams but also becoming the burden that cuts us off from our humanity.

Wealth is good and bad; Poverty is good and bad. Nature is wealthy in Summer and Autumn; Nature is poor in Winter and Spring. We must experience the entire round of this cycle in order to gain depth as human beings in human cultures. Something is taken from us in Winter – but something is also given to us. We lose our bodily pleasures and our bodily strengths but we gain a spiritual treasury. We lose power but we gain perspective. We lose passion but we gain compassion. We lose wealth but we gain peace of mind, if we are fortunate. We lose youth but we gain a sense of completion.

And, rest assured, deflation is not the end of all things, is not the last movement in a dying opera. The universe is a seed that expands as a bubble with the hot, fiery Great Breath and builds great creations. But Time kills the universe too. The atomic alarm clock goes off. The universe contracts, crumpling matter as it recedes, pulling down great structures, as matter drawn back down toward the black hole center of anti-matter, contracting back in to a seed again. It is a never-ending process.

The universe is a great tree that rises up and falls back down again, rises up and falls back down again, an endless cycle of Day and Night, each time carrying a new dream into construction, the dream it is given in the Night. The seed is the dreaming time, and the resting time. So it is with humanity. So it is with the human atom, Man.

Do we really need an economic deflation? Yes.

I worked for thirty years in administration at the University of Oregon. Each year, as part of my tasks, I developed a statistical study for the department. One such study centered on the cost of tuition for students.

From 1976 to 2007, University of Oregon full-time tuition for undergraduate residents of Oregon climbed from $216 per term to $2107. This is an increase in thirty years of 875%.

In the same time, full-time tuition for non-resident graduate students increased from $320 per term to $5447 per term, an increase of 1602%.

To put this in perspective, a person earning $20,000 per year in 1976 (a reasonable salary at the time), would need to be making $320,400 in 2007 in order to keep up with this suggested inflationary rate.

A person earning $60,000 in 1976 (a higher administration type salary), would need to be making $961,200 in 2007 in order to be keeping up with this inflationary rate.

Not many job categories have increased at this rate. Some have: CEO’s of elite American businesses, successful founders of technology or biotechnology companies, or internet start-ups, Wall Street investment bankers, perhaps doctors and professional and college football coaches. But most Americans have not seen this kind of inflation of salary rates.

It is not just higher education which has inflated so dramatically.

When I was entering college in 1970, a new Volkswagon bug cost $1700. Today, a new bug costs $20,000. This is an increase of 1100%. A person making $20,000 in 1970 would need to be making more than $215,000 dollars today to keep up with that inflation rate.

Then, of course, there are housing prices.

My sister-in-law in Portland, Oregon bought her house in 1988 for $71,000. This was a modest three-bedroom house in a modest part of Portland. She and her husband had just emigrated from Vietnam; both she and her husband were working jobs starting at close to minimum wage. She had $3000 in savings and borrowed another $4000 from her mother to secure a 10% down-payment. In 2007, this house was valued at $700,000. In 2008, Portland housing declined about 10%. A house that has increased in value from $71,000 in 1988 to $630,000 in 2008 has increased 787% in twenty years. A couple making $30,000 in 1988 should be making $236,100 in 2008 in order to keep up with the suggested inflation rate designated by this gain in housing.

Talk about ‘global warming’!

In 1950, the year I was born, the median price of a house was $14,500. Average income was $3,216. In 2006, average house prices in the U.S. were $232,000. This is a gain of 1500% and suggests that average income in 2006 should be around $300,000 per year, using 1950 as a benchmark of normality.

The global economy has been in a condition of ‘massive, unsustainable animal heat’ for more than a decade, with Alan Greenspan leading the charge, cheering on the dogs: ‘Get your dreams now! Take on more debt! Being deeply in debt is a great thing for yourself, for your family, and for your country – even for the health and well-being of the Earth!’

Debt is good. Debt is sustainable.

But are high levels of debt really sustainable? A picture is worth a thousand words. In 1950, Americans’ debt to income was 20%. It is currently almost 120%. Personal savings as a percentage of income was 7% in 1950; today it is less than 1% (in the chart below it is 1% -- it has grown to about 3% in early 2009), the lowest it has been since the 1930’s, when it went negative.

A second chart shows current American total debt is 350% of GDP, the highest in history. In 1930 American debt was 300% of GDP; and we all know what happened to the economy at that point in history. American debt amassed in the late 1920’s and 1930’s did not get unwound until almost 1960. In the late 1990’s American debt vs GDP attempted to peak at about 240%. Alan Greenspan to the rescue. To drive off the great leviathan of recession, Mister Greenspan opened up the waters of liquidity: Americans responded by taking on more debt, pushing total debt to 350% of GDP in 2008. More debt does not solve the problem of a society carrying too much debt. Stimulus packages and lower interest rates will not achieve a renewed American economic might – just more debt for the taxpayer and more debt for the consumer.

We are in a very deep hole. And it will take America almost a generation to get out of the hole we have all dug, with the help of Mister Greenspan and his ‘free market’ ideology.

Analysts might argue that it took Americans almost 30 years to dig out of debt from the Great Depression Era because this massive indebtedness caused a depression, which was then followed by a world war, depriving Americans of an optimum wealth-building business environment for fifteen years after the crash in 1930. Well, we are entering the depression at this moment; and the national responses to another great international depression will make another world war also very likely.

The Era of Fast Money-Making is over. We have entered a new reality, one that will not be an optimum business environment for at least a generation.

A look at one last chart shows the extent of housing inflation that occurred under Mister Greenspan’s watch. The broken line is the Case-Schiller projection of a housing bottom in 2016 or 2017.

Is it any wonder housing prices have fallen off a cliff? Fewer and fewer people can afford to buy a house at their current bloated levels, especially now that ‘creative accounting’ banking and exotic no-money-down, interest-only-payments-for-three-years mortgages (so called ‘liar loans’) are no longer in favor at America’s insolvent banks.

Also, people have already taken on maximum amounts of debt.

Also, with unemployment rising, businesses failing, with further foreclosures coming as variable-rate mortgages demand significantly higher monthly housing payments throughout 2009, 2010, and 2011, and with commercial real-estate heading down the drain, housing prices are set to fall at least another 50%.

My sister-in-law’s house, which she brought for $71,000, and which listed at $700,000 in 2006, should be worth $120,000 when the smoke finally clears, which will mean a gain of about 2.5% per year, which is the historical average.

Health-care costs, energy costs, the cost of food have all spiraled upward…has the cost of anything gone down in the last thirty years, except for computers and memory chips and some electronic equipment?

Salaries have moved sideways. Salaries have definitely gone down for a man or woman who once worked in heavy manufacturing and is now selling coffee at Starbucks after his or her job was exported to China.

One of the reasons salaries are stuck is because of the collusion that has driven health-care costs through the roof. Doctors, medical providers, pharmaceutical companies, and insurance companies all have been having the times of their lives in America. Everybody has been getting rich, at the expense of the American worker and at the expense of sick and dying Americans. Businesses that provide workers with health-insurance benefits have watched insurance premiums rise nearly 10% per year for more than a decade. Doctors, hospitals, drug companies raise prices; insurance companies raise premiums. The worker asks his employer for a raise and the employer says I’d love to give you a raise – but I already gave you a 9% raise in your health-care premium. A worker making $35,000 a year in 1998 would receive a comparable salary of $90,314.90 in 2009 if health-care premium increases were excluded from the cost of his salary. The worker is still being paid $30,000 a year in 2009. All the extra money is being paid to the insurance company. The insurance companies don’t care if doctors and drug companies raise prices, in fact they want them to raise prices; they just pass the costs on to the worker and the employer.

My wife takes asthma medication, which costs about $150 per spray-bottle in the US. When we visit friends and family in Vietnam, the same medication costs $10 per bottle. There is a conspiracy in America between doctors, medical providers, insurance companies, and politicians to gouge the American consumer. And this has been going on for decades. This is a natural side-effect of the Reagan/Greenspan/Bush doctrine that the business-class can do no wrong, that the business-class should be allowed to regulate itself, that business profits are sacred and trickle down through the entire society; and government should simply stay out of the way.

But does the American Dream require that individuals be allowed to become rich at the expense of middle class and poor Americans? I don’t think it does. Ingenuity, hard work, and intelligent risk-taking should be rewarded. But what we have now, in the health-provider fields, on wall street, and in the banking industry, and in many other branches of American business, is a form of state-capitalism, in which the government and businesses work hand-in-hand to enrich themselves, legally and illegally – and the rest of the crew of our ship of state can be damned.

The health-care bubble needs to be popped to make medical care affordable for all Americans. In 2009, even with all the defaults and foreclosures connected with the housing crisis, over 60% of all bankruptcies of American citizens were caused by medical catastrophes. Americans weren’t only spending beyond their means – they were being gauged by the health-care providers. Even Americans with health-care insurance often face insurmountable difficulties in receiving insurance payments when catastrophic illness strikes.

The following ClusterStock chart indicates quite clearly the bubble in health-care costs, driven most by the greed of the health-care providers:

How do we know it is the ‘greed’ of health-providers that have caused this massive bubble, rather than increased cost of treatments and technology, and the shark-invested legal waters ballooning the cost of malpractice insurance? (Again, the insurance companies! And the lawyers!)

David Schuler, a health-care researcher and writer, explains where the costs of health-care are rising so much:

From 1965 to 1981 national expenditures on health care more than doubled from $201 billion to $507 billion in real 2009 dollars. Most of the increase in costs in healthcare can be explained by three factors: increased utilization, particularly immediately after the enactment of Medicare and Medicaid during the period 1965-1972, higher prices, particularly during the period 1972-1981, and inflation. Most of the increases after 1981 can be explained by inflation alone.

In the period 1965-1972 use increases accounted for 45.8% of the increase in healthcare spending and price increases accounted for 45%. In the period 1965-1972 57.5% of the increase in spending for physician services can be accounted for by price increases and 32.2% accounted for by increased utilization.

Hospital expenses and physician services account for the majority of healthcare costs and both of those are other words for people’s incomes. Rent, insurance, equipment, and so on are a pittance by comparison with wages as components of both of those.

Here’s my alternative explanation for what has happened to healthcare costs. In the immediate aftermath of the enactment of Medicare and Medicaid in 1966 there was an increased utilization of healthcare. That is what was supposed to happen: old people and poor people were supposed to get more healthcare. In a fee for services environment, the model that prevailed at the time and still has considerable force, that means that physicians and hospitals made significantly more money. Their incomes increased. When utilization levelled off (as should also have been expected) they continued to increase their incomes by raising prices. They had become accustomed to increasing incomes.

In the late 1970’s and early 1980’s the increasing healthcare expenditures capturing of such a quickly rising proportion of the federal budget finally caught the attention of the Congress and a number of steps were taken to slow the increase. But the harm had mostly been done. A high cost basis had been built into healthcare, healthcare was a major component of total GDP, and inflation alone (of which rising healthcare costs are one of the largest components) was enough for healthcare costs to grow unsustainably.

I am not blaming healthcare providers for acting this way. I believe it was a natural human response and they responded as anyone else would have under the circumstances.

However, it means that simple cost control won’t achieve what we need to accomplish. The primary components of healthcare costs are hospital costs and physician services which comprise the majority of costs, insurance administrative costs which comprise something like 30% of costs, pharmaceutical costs which comprise something like 10% of costs, and other factors which comprise very small proportions of the whole. All of these costs are other words for wages, somebody’s income. Healthcare costs are high because wages in the sector are high.

What kind of civilized, wealthy society allows a poor person to die because he or she lacks money for medical care? We claim to be a God-fearing people, a spiritual people, but we still seek to deny charity in our society to all except those who don’t need it. This moral stinginess is a sign of corruption. This selfish, small nature must be corrected. We Americans are a tribal family of men and women and children. We must treat our family with justice and generosity. When we do this, we all benefit and live in a more decent and supporting environment. We will spend our public money to build more schools instead of building more prisons.

We can choose, as a nation, to change our values. We are not obligated to support a state-vision through which doctors, drug company executives, and insurance agents are made millionaires while the vast majority of Americans cannot afford the costs of their services, except as ‘benefits’ at work. And how secure is this ‘benefit’? Lose your job: lose your right to health-care treatment. A serious illness then results automatically in bankruptcy – perhaps in both death and bankruptcy. Is this the way we want to live? Are these the values we want to give our children? Is it reasonable for us to glorify only the rich in our society; and to discard those who are not rich, who are not the ‘winners’ we admire so ardently?

God wants humans to build a heavenly kingdom on the Earth. This means taking care of one another. This means not exploiting others for financial gain. This is a set of values religious Americans need to think about deeply, This is the message of Jesus Christ. Christians need to remember the meaning of the message of Christ.

Jesus was not a conservative. Jesus was a moral revolutionary who preached that humanity needed to change its behavior, needed to change the way it interacted with its brethren. He preached love, generosity, selflessness, and equality. He did not preach the virtues of materialism, selfishness, and suspicion – nor did he espouse the virtue of the rich and the degeneracy of the poor. Jesus preached generosity to the unfortunate; Jesus also surmised that the common vices of the rich made admission of the affluent to the heavenly kingdom almost impossible.

If the rich wish to proclaim ‘Jesus be damned, we’ll take wealth on the earth and nothing in the afterlife’, then fine. But one can’t have it both ways.

We must understand the symbolism of Jesus driving the money-changers out of the temple was a very simple observation that God does not reward piety with earthly pleasures and wealth. This is the false argument used by the Satanic Force, which justifies its own greed for power by maintaining Earthly Power’s alliance with God. Jesus admonishes this fraudulence, and commands the bankers to desist in their apparent alliance with Spirit, to leave the protection of this false justification of their own ‘chosen’ status.

We’ll also remember that Satan met Jesus in the wilderness and offered him power over all the Earth.

God is not source of Earthly power and wealth; the Devil is. The Devil’s Contract and God’s Covenant are not the same document. This is a truth the many Christians have conveniently forgotten during the feeding frenzy that his gripped the Earth for so many years.

The Higher Education bubble needs to be popped to make education affordable for all Americans with an aptitude for university study. This will require more education support from federal and state governments. It will also require the popping of the health-care bubble, which has become such a huge burden for universities and for university students, not to mention non-educational American businesses.

When someone pointed out to Alan Greenspan the ‘irrational exuberance’ of the housing bubble in 2005, Alan commented: ‘Even if there are declines in prices, the significant run-up to date has so increased equity in homes that only those who have purchased very recently, purchased just before prices actually literally go down, are going to have problems.’

Wrong, Alan.

The American banking system was also going to have problems, as banks careened toward default, insolvency, bankruptcy. The American Ruling Class was also going to have problems: Lehman Brothers would be gone; Morgan-Stanley would be going; Goldman-Sachs would essentially be castrated; and, without massive intervention from their former boss, Henry Paulson (who made over $400 million dollars from Goldman-Sachs stock options before joining George Bush’s government), who essentially robbed American taxpayers to try save his friends on Wall Street, Goldman-Sachs would have vanished.

Nothing was more bizarre than witnessing the bullying Paulson and his trembling shadow Bernanke appear like magistrates of social reconstitution before Congress, putting a gun to the heads of unsuspecting congressional leaders, demanding trillions of taxpayer dollars to ensure the salvation of Western Civilization, something of which only Paulson was now capable, insisting Congress approve a scheme whereby Paulson could give money to whomever he chose, and demanding a guarantee that no one connected in any way with the blatant act of highway robbery (the ‘bailout’ being reconstituted euphemistically as a ‘rescue’, first, and then as a ‘conservatorship’) could ever be held legally accountable after the crime.

The arrogance of the man!

Paulson later told a colleague: ‘It didn’t have to be a trillion dollars. It could have been anything! But it had to sound big.’

He wanted to scare legislators and the President into giving him what he wanted. He haunted Congress and George Bush with the picture of banks collapsing, riots, revolution, tanks in the streets, Washington D.C., and New York on fire. Washington swallowed its collective tongue (there were resistors) and gave Paulson $500 billion with few questions asked, few strings attached. Later, after giving away his stash, Paulson refused to divulge to the American public the names of the private institutions to which the cash grants had been made, concerned that stigma might attach to institutions so unsubtly graced (and so needing to be graced).

Now, after the first wave of $500 billion of personal Paulson loans and gifts to banks and financial firms (some at least with equity stakes) has not done the trick, we hear that more taxpayer money will be needed if the American banking system would survive its own mismanagement.

Alan: you were wrong. Your policy was doomed. AIG is gone; Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are gone, all ghosts of their former selves, all shadows slipping in to nothingness of the sea.

Wall Street is gone, Alan. The investment banks you so admired, which helped to fuel the global free-market bubble, and fly proudly the great American flag of world financial leadership, have vanished or gone in to hiding, begging the government for money; once proud titans, now hat-in-hand, begging Congress for their own survival. How the mighty have fallen!

The ‘free-market’ is gone, too, Alan. We are heading, inevitably, into an environment of protectionism, of tariffs, of limited trade, of national responses to an international crisis, to international political realignment, probably to world war. And the ideology of the vainglorious ‘free-market system’, wherein noble and virtuous corporate leaders and financiers would be wise and capable of disciplining themselves, will not be mentioned again by serious policy-makers for at least another half-century or so. American capitalism has shamed itself on a huge public stage. American capitalism has given back all it won after a century of battle with Marxist dogma, given it all back and then some, because greedy bankers and politicians could not discipline themselves and limit their own obsessive needs to win.

Positive thinking, and cheerleading the business model, is not the same as the moral leadership of a nation. And it is not in the nature of wanna-be billionaires (i.e., criminals) to discipline themselves when no one is watching.

In early 2009, Alan, one in ten mortgages in America are either in foreclosure or under water (are worth less than what is still owed on the mortgage). Six million jobs for American workers have vanished. Even more millions of jobs for global workers have vanished. Suicides, mental illness, alcoholism, divorce, crime….these are all real side effects of the destruction of our economy.

Ervin and Ana Lupoe both worked as medical technicians at a Kaiser-Permanente hospital in West Los Angeles. They owed $850,000 on a mortgage; they both lost their jobs. They were in foreclosure; and they bounced a check for back-taxes with the IRS. So Ervin shot his five children, his wife and then himself. They were trapped; and becoming homeless with five children was not a future they were willing to confront. This was the seventh murder-suicide of a family in California since the depression, generated by the broken housing bubble, hit California.

More than just a few late-comers to the global housing Gold Rush are going down in flames, Mister Greenspan. Some of your friends are probably going down too.

What can the new Obama government do to solve the problems of economic collapse during this necessary period of deflation? Not much really. In a very real way, depression is ‘matter’ being drawn into a black hole, matter being destroyed through a growing proximity to anti-matter. Government can provide support systems for its citizens, extend unemployment benefits, generate government jobs to help reconstruct the infrastructure, protect savings in the self-destructing banking system. But all the trillions of dollars the government is now throwing or is planning to throw at the collapsing financial balloon of the global economy will not stop the ship from sinking. This depression will not bottom out until that atomic alarm clock goes off again, signaling the Dawn, when the necessary deflation will have finally been accomplished. We will look at this question more deeply later.

One thing government can and must do, however, is to raise taxes on the very rich Americans to provide social support systems for those who have been impoverished by errors, sins, and misdeeds committed mostly by America’s rich, those ‘masters of the universe’.

As I have suggested, I believe in Ecclesiaste’s wisdom: to everything there is a season. Let the rich generate personal wealth during the Day; and let the rich give back this wealth during the Night. It is a mechanism we can follow. Competition by Day; and Cooperation by Night. Lower taxes during the Day-Cycle; higher taxes during the Night-Cycle.

The danger the richest class faces, if they resist such collective sharing of the wealth during the Night-Cycle, is that they might lose everything in a social revolution, which is always a possibility during a deflationary Night-Cycle. History shows many examples of inflexible arrogant rich classes being stripped of their wealth and driven in to exile during Night-Cycles, when the moral imperative changes sides, joins forces with the weak.

One wonders why Alan Greenspan has not joined the monastery by now after his ‘free market’ doctrine and policy has helped to turn the American and global financial gargantua into a paper junkyard; and has turned the financial promises of America’s once-proud corporations into a kaleidoscope of shrinking visions, corporate corruption, and a rattled pyramid of junk-bonds.

The ‘I made a mistake’ statement – i.e., ‘I made an error in judgment’ – is not enough, Alan. Admit that you are a kind of Ahab! Admit that you unintentionally torpedoed the Pequod, the boat in which all Americans are riding! Admit that you sank the American Ship of State because you were trying to destroy Death, trying to defeat the Shadow; you were trying to exterminate the Great White Whale of philosophical and financial and physical mortality!

Tell us that your ambition was great, even as your judgment was flawed, as your management skill was … much less than advertised! A good education, and mediocre understanding, almost always lead to tragic results.

“I continue to believe the U.S. economy is healthy.  We have had a significant housing correction in the U.S. You can’t have a correction like that without causing some dislocations. It’s too early to tell whether it’s bottomed. I believe it has…….shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that there’s some fallout in the subprime mortgage market … but it’s largely contained.”

~Henry Paulson  March 2007

What is the difference between a Banker and a Mafioso?

The Banker is the Mafioso at the end of his career. The

Mafioso is the Banker at the beginning of his career.

Colloquial Proverb

CHAPTER FOUR.

APOLLO AND DIONYSUS. THE COWBOY AND THE INDIAN.

"Practical men who believe themselves to be quite immune from intellectual influences are usually the slaves of some defunct economist."

John Maynard Keynes

The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche re-discovered in Greek mythology the ancient classical ideas of the divine manifestations of Day and Night. In his book, The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche draws a clear distinction between the Day brother, Apollo, and his shadow, the Night brother, Dionysus.

In The Consequences of Ideas, R.C. Sproul writes:

‘While working on his doctoral dissertation, Nietzsche studied classical Greek art and philosophy. He noted the ancient conflict seen in the images of Apollo and Dionysus. In these images, Nietzsche discovered the visceral antagonism within himself, and antithesis between the mind and the will. In Apollo, the rational and the orderly are incarnated. Apollo represents the Greek ideal of order and harmony. Apollonian art displays perfect symmetry and proportionality. Its sculpture displays no warts. The figure of Dionysus, on the other hand, represents the element of the chaotic. Dionysus was worshiped in the ancient Bacchanalia, named after Bacchus, god of the grape or of wine. In the ancient ritual, one attains mystical release from the inhibition of reason by entering into a drunken, orgiastic stupor. In this Dionysian frenzy, a person loses his individual identity as he merges into mystical union with a transcendent ‘one’ or ‘oversoul’.

For Nietzsche, the Apollonian idea is realized in Hegel’s intellectualism, the Dionysian mood in Arthur Schopenhauer’s voluntarism. The Dionysian model offers entrance into a dynamic stream of life-force marked by passion and expressed in music that creates a feeling of abandon.

Historical movements representing the Day and Night cycles would later be called Rationalism and Romanticism. Of course, the advent of the Wagnerian Dionysus imperative was an intimation of the rise of National Socialism in Germany. We will note that the manifestation of Dionysus will always be associated with destruction.

George S. Williamson, in his book The Longing for Myth in Germany, would write:

The stated purpose of The Birth of Tragedy was to set forth the ‘secret doctrines’ of Greek aesthetics. Greek culture, Nietzsche argued, originated from the interaction of two antagonistic forces, represented by the deities Apollo and Dionysus. Apollo was the power that created the images of dreams and fantasy. The beautiful forms of Greek sculpture, the coherence of the individual psyche, even the ordered veneer of the phenomenal world, were all products of Apollonian illusion. Dionysus, by contrast, was the formless abyss of suffering that coursed underneath these tranquil surfaces. The Dionysian reached its perfect expression in music, an art form without images. According to Nietzsche’s scheme, the cultural flowering of Greece depended on the continual tension between Apollo and Dionysus, just as procreation depended on a dualism of the sexes, with ‘continuous strife and only periodic reconciliation.’

It was the Apollonian impulse that had given rise to the bright Homeric deities, whose serene images had led Winckelmann and Schiller to praise the blessedness and naivete of Greek life. But, now, Nietzsche contended, ‘the Olympic magic mountain opens up for us and shows us its roots.’ For the Apollonian images did not reflect Greek happiness but, rather, compensated for a darkly pessimistic [and recognizably Schopenhauerian] worldview. From time to time this world of appearances would fall away, as the hard-won individuality of the Greeks collapsed in a torrent of Dionysian ecstasy. On such occasions social distinctions were overturned, ‘the slave became a free man’, and neighbor was reconciled with neighbor in an ecstatic celebration of unity. ‘Man is no longer an artist, he has become a work of art. The aesthetic power of all nature, to the highest satisfaction of the primordial unity, reveals itself here in the tremblings of intoxication.’

Apollo was thoughtful; Dionysus was willful. Apollo was dreamy; Dionysus was worldly. Apollo was saintly and artistic. Dionysus was devilish and materialistic. Apollo wrote about life, described it in sculpture or painting. Dionysus lived life, in all its brightness and darkness. Apollo’s expression touches on perfection. Dionysus is the birth of the tragic. Apollo is a ‘detached’ man of reflection, governed by intellect. Dionysus is an ‘attached’, passionate man of action, governed by body and by the life-instinct. Apollo expressed the subjective; Dionysus expressed the objective. Apollo was concerned with God’s laws; Dionysus was more concerned with man’s laws.

H.L.Mencken wrote in The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche:

In ancient Greece, he pointed out at the start, Apollo was the god of art - of life as it was recorded and interpreted - and Bacchus Dionysus was the god of life itself - of eating, drinking and making merry, of dancing and roistering, of everything that made men acutely conscious of the vitality and will within them. The difference between the things they represented has been well set forth in certain homely verses addressed by Rudyard Kipling to Admiral Robley D. Evans, U. S. N.:

Zogbaum draws with a pencil

And I do things with a pen,

But you sit up in a conning tower,

Bossing eight hundred men.

To him that hath shall be given

And that's why these books are sent

To the man who has lived more stories

Than Zogbaum or I could invent.

Here we have the plain distinction: Zogbaum and Kipling are apollonic, while Evans is dionysian. Epic poetry, sculpture, painting and story-telling are apollonic: they represent, not life itself, but some one man's visualized idea of life. But dancing, great deeds and, in some cases, music, are dionysian: they are part and parcel of life as some actual human being, or collection of human beings, is living it.

Nietzsche maintained that Greek art was at first apollonic, but that eventually there appeared a dionysian influence - the fruit, perhaps, of contact with primitive, barbarous peoples. Ever afterward there was constant conflict between them and this conflict was the essence of Greek tragedy. As Sarcey tells us, a play, to hold our attention, must depict some sort of battle, between man and man or idea and idea. In the melodrama of today the battle is between hero and villain; in the ancient Greek tragedy it was between Apollo and Dionysus, between the life contemplative and the life strenuous, between law and outlaw, between the devil and the seraphim.

Nietzsche, as we shall see, afterward applied this distinction in morals and life as well as in art. He called himself a dionysian and the crowning volume of his system of philosophy, which he had barely started when insanity overtook him, was to have been called "Dionysus."

I write that Nietzsche re-discovered the meaning of Apollo and Dionysus. The metaphysical meaning of Apollo and Dionysus dates back to the most ancient philosophies of Assyria and Babylon, and began as a concept connected to the Moon. Moon-worship developed before Sun-worship. Moon cycles were easy to observe from the Earth, as the Moon moved through a very distinct 28-day cycle divisible in to 4 equal segments of 7 days each. Seven was a sacred number of most early religions because of the Moon’s easy divisibility. The creation of the Week as a division of time came from the observation of the Moon cycle.

Also moon-worship developed in the southern climates where, quite literally, the Sun was experienced as an oppressive force, the Moon as a soothing sanctuary from the deadly heat of the day.

The North worshipped the Sun because the Sun saves the North from the killing cold of Winter (Night daily embodiment of its larger cyclic brother Winter). The South worships the Moon because the Moon saves the South from the killing heat of Summer (Day is, of course, the small-cycle counterpart of Summer).

There is this built-in duality of Earth: when it is Day in the East it is Night in the West; when it is Summer in the North, it is Winter in the South. This, in part, explains the conflict built-in to Earth cycles. Each of the four quarters of the Earth is experiencing life at a different stage of the cycle and through a different perspective of reality. Each perspective, in this sense, is ‘true’ – yet, also, at the same time, adamantly contradictory.

When civilizations developed more advanced sciences in astrology/astronomy (and when civilization moved more northward), Sun-Worship supplanted Moon-Worship; but Sun-Worship presented a similar time-structure as Moon-Worship, this time over the term of One Year as the Moon did over the term of One Month.

The Time Structure of the single Day also evinced a similar structure: two forces in opposition; two forces in balance.

Three time elements were seen to have a common archetypal structure.

The trinitary Time divisions into four ‘seasons’ were:

Dawn Noon Dusk Midnight

Waxing Half Moon Full Moon Waning Half Moon New Moon

Spring Equinox Summer Solstice Autumn Equinox Winter Solstice

Ernest Busenbark writes in his (unfortunately-titled 1949 book) Symbols, Sex and the Stars:

In addition to the myths derived from the ancient belief that the moon was a Generator of Life, Goddess of Motherhood and Regulator of Fate, the moon was the subject of another type of myth, in which her monthly changes were thought to be the result of a conflict between deities. It was a contest between the God of Light, or the Overworld, and the God of Darkness, or the Underworld, in which each contestant triumphed, in turn, over the other. With the growth of sun worship, the myths, which were based upon this theme, began to partake of a solar character.

The underlying motifs of the Light and Darkness myths were growth and decay, life and death, day and night, summer and winter, which seemed to constitute systems of pairs of opposites by which all life and activity in the universe was maintained in a state of balance by the opposition of natural forces.

The Mother Goddess cults generally deteriorated gradually into sex worship, and finally passed from the world’s stage, leaving only a mass of myths and superstitions; but the Light-Darkness myths contained the germ from which developed the great ‘ethic’ religions which now, for upwards of 2500 years, have played a great part in molding civilization….

Light was not, in itself, a complete entity: it required the Darkness to make it whole, just as the Male required the Female. As a positive current of electricity is without force unless accompanied by a negative current, so, in early times, the God or Power of Light was considered incomplete without the power of Darkness to give it contrast, opposition, force, and completeness.

Opposition or apparent conflict between the ascending and descending phases of the Moon provided the underlying motif for the story of the Two Brothers, called the ‘parted’, which, in various forms, is found in mythology all over the world. In the zodiac, they are thought to be represented as Gemini, the Twins. In China, they appear as Oph and Shichim; in India they are Cristna and Balarama; in Egypt, Set and Horus. Some students of comparative religion see similar motifs in the conflicts between Abel and Cain, and Jacob and Essau.

The descending half of the Moon was often depicted as the Dark One, the Deceiver. In another type of myth, the descending Moon becomes the Manifester, the Precursor or the Sacrificial Type; and the ascending half is portrayed as the Bringer of Light, the Savior or Redeemer.

The Full Moon is, of course, the Virgin Mother, the Queen of Heaven.

In Egyptian mythology, the ascending phase of the Moon, as the reflector of the Sun’s Light is represented by the God Horus, who is portrayed as the Eye of the Sun. The dark phase is caused by Set, the demon of Darkness, who steals or wounds the Eye of Horus. On ancient monuments, Set is shown with the head of a jackal, which fact proclaims him as the Night Prowler and the Thief of Light.

Graphically, this dual representation of Light Brother/Dark Brother, overlaid on our Time diagrams, appears below. Apollo, of course, in this context, represents the Bringer of Light; Dionysus represents the bringer of Darkness, whose power grows from nothing at Noon or the Summer Solstice, when there is no shadow, to all-powerful at Midnight or the Winter Solstice – at which point Light is weakest, almost non-existent. Of course, the Winter Solstice represents the birth of light, the birth of Christ, the re-birth of the Solar Hero, the re-birth of Apollo.

This discussion is complicated by the fact that the perception from the material universe is exactly reversed from the perception from the anti-material universe (the spiritual universe). In the material universe, white (Day) is good and black (Night) is bad. In the anti-material universe, Day is bad – the arena or ring of conflict, where sins are committed, and where karma is accrued-- and Night is good, a place of rest and reflection – also a realm of judgment for those who have sinned during the Day. At Night the soul approaches his God. Day is the time when the material world expands – riches, powers, temptations are given to the soul. Night is the time when the spiritual world expands. But in the anti-matter world, expanding materialism is the darkness, the Night, not the Light, the Day.

Both perceptions are illusions, as I have written. Illusions being part-truths. But both illusions are very potent; and both illusions power the world into action and re-action, back into Day and back into Night.

The material world relates to the anti-material world as the photograph relates to the photographic negative. Light relates to darkness in this same manner. Without darkness there is no light. Without the photographic negative, there is no photograph.

I realize I have awkwardly complicated these ideas, ideas which were somewhat complex even before I added the mirror reflection.

For my own purposes, the myth of Apollo and Dionysus seems too classical and too European. To more clearly present this structure in the American context I believe the ‘updated’ concept of Cowboy and Indian might be more useful. I will also use the expressions Day-Force and Night-Force, as well as the expressions Culture and Counter-Culture. I have a slightly different take on the essences of these two ‘brother’ natures, in fact.

Who is the Cowboy? The Cowboy is the White Man who is attracted to his opposite, the Dark Woman (the Earth). We will see that the Indian is the Dark Man who is attracted to his opposite, the White Woman (the Moon). The White Man is the Spirit Force materializing, falling to Earth. The Dark Man is the Matter Force spiritualizing, rising into Heaven. As the Spirit Force falls, it becomes darker. As the Matter Force rises, it becomes lighter. The Hebrew diagram for the Star of David incorporates some of these same ideas.

I have written that the White Man (the ‘winner’, the ‘successful’ force) will become, in time, the Dark Man (the ‘loser’, the ‘defeated’ force) – and, when the White Man becomes Dark (‘Dark with sin’) he will be rejected by the Dark Woman, the Earth – this is a basic law of physics, opposites attract; like forces repel. And this White Man-become-Dark Man will then be saved by the White Woman, the Moon, the Virgin Mary in Christian terminology. The Dark Man becomes the Messiah, the Soul, that is given birth by the Wisdom of the Night, the Virgin Moon, shining in the Night Sea.

The Cowboy is the force of the Day, the Physical Sun, the force of Man’s Law that supports city-building and civilization. The Cowboy is the fertility force, the Sun that magnetically inspires the growth of crops, the building of wealth, procreation, empire, material expansion.

The Indian is the force of the Night, the Metaphysical Sun, the force of God’s Law that destroys city-building and civilization through the force of inactivity, the force of the Dream-Time. The Cowboy is Human nature; the Indian is the human-in-Nature.

The Cowboy is the Hero, who seeks to defend the innocent Community from the forces of Evil. The Indian is an Anti-Hero, who seeks to defend the innocent and the poor from the evil forces of the corrupt overlord community.

How all this hidden symbolic structure relates to history has been pursued and presented by some historians, Oswald Spengler, Gambattisto Vico, and, in a different sense, Marsilio Ficino have all written morphological studies of history. These approaches have been met with admiration at certain cycles of history, and with ridicule at others. Clearly these historians are Indian types, whose visions are generated through the symbolic mind, not the Cowboy rational mind. Science comprehends the straight line of causality but not the curved line of cyclicality, which it considers superstition.

Freud was a Cowboy (read ‘practical’); Jung was an Indian (read ‘other-worldly’). Confucius was Cowboy (read ‘willful’); Lao-Tse was an Indian (read ‘selfless’). Aristotle was a Cowboy (read ‘a physician of the Real World’); Plato was an Indian (read ‘a metaphysician of the Ideal World’).

Negentropy (an unfortunate name for the increasing complexity of organization of information) is a Day-Force; Entropy (increasing complexity of disorganization of information) is a Night-Force – i.e., the physical world runs down. The Lone Ranger was a Cowboy, obviously; and Tonto was an Indian. Tom Sawyer was a Cowboy; Huckleberry Finn was an Indian. (Huckleberry Finn was a Cowboy; and Jim the Slave was an Indian. This shows how complex this structure is, and how roles shift depending upon the attendant elements participating in the atom.)

A contemporary Jungian scholar (it may have been James Hillman or Edward Edinger, both of whom I admire) described the difference between Freud and Jung as being (and I am paraphrasing) that Freud sees the world through the eyes of a youth approaching the world of men seeking life, success, and well-adjusted conformity to man’s social structure; whereas Jung sees the world through the eyes of an adult approaching old age and death, seeking knowledge of the future life (Eternal Time) and a well-adjusted conformity to God’s more esoteric spiritual structure.

The diagram (above) of the Apollo/Dionysus polarity is not very exact. In a more real sense, the Light rules from Dawn to Dusk (the Overworld); the Darkness rules from Dusk to Dawn (the Underworld). But the diagram above does show an aspect of the two brothers’ relationship: Light is weakest at Midnight (Winter Solstice) – i.e., the days are shortest -- but begins gaining strength at this point until Noon (Summer Solstice), when days are longest, nights are shortest. At Summer Solstice, Light begins to lose its battle with Darkness – nights begin to get longer, days shorter. Darkness is weakest at Noon (Summer Solstice), after which Darkness begins to win the battle with Light.

Then the children of Israel did evil in the sight of the Lord, and

served the Baals and the Astoreths, the gods of Syria, the gods

of Sidon, the gods of Moloch… So the anger of the Lord was hot

against Israel; and he sold them into the hands of the Phillistines

and into the hands of the people of Ammon. From that year they

harassed and oppressed the children of Israel for eighteen years…

Book of Judges,: 10, 11

CHAPTER FOUR.

DAYS AND NIGHTS IN AMERICAN HISTORY.

(If There Is Precision Inherent in Matter, Is There Not Also an Implied Precision in Matter’s Behavior?)

‘All things from eternity are of like-forms and come round in a circle.’

Marcus Aurelius

Ronald Reagan was a Cowboy; Jimmy Carter was an Indian. Barack Obama is an Indian.

The illusion is that the Cowboy and Indian, the Culture and the Counter-Culture, are two separate forces, two separate natures and personalities. In fact, these two forces are a unity. The Cowboy is the youth approaching the world of men seeking life, success, and well-adjusted conformity to man’s social structure; the Indian is that same force at a different point in the Time Cycle, as an adult approaching old age and death, seeking knowledge of the future life (Eternal Time) while seeking a well-adjusted conformity to God’s more esoteric spiritual or anti-material structure.

The Cowboy carries the world out of anti-matter (the Dream Time, Eternal Time) in to the world of matter (Time); the Indian carries the world out of matter back in to the black hole of anti-matter. The ‘black hole’ of depression is a kind of womb in which we germinate, dream, in and from which we find the ‘mask’ or vision our re-birth.

The Cowboy represents the Life of the Body, the life of Form, Formality, Reason, Law, Civilization, Scientific Intellect The Indian represents the Life of the Soul, the Life of Mind (Spiritual Intellect), Informality, Dreams, Creativity, Culture, Art, Community. Every culture, nation, individual needs to develop both sides of this ‘personality’, the Day Personality and the Night Personality.

The Cowboy builds the physical world and provides security and rules of behavior in which the society can develop. The Cowboy brings law to the world, order, civilization. The Cowboy ‘engineers’ the world, building structures in the external world, houses, cities, nations, specializing in technology, expanding its influence on a truly global scale. The Indians (the Indians are Asiatic in origin) are more passive in the physical world, view Nature as a divinity, rather than a resource to be appropriated or ‘developed’ (which is an interesting word, as though Nature were not developed. The ‘developer’ is clearly one of the more interesting euphemisms that materialism has imagined.) The Indians build structures, understandings, in the internal world, develop relationships with gods, spirits and ancestors who live now in the dream world.

Cowboys are Solar-Worshippers. Indians are Lunar-Worshippers.

Cowboys abhors the Indian, think the Indian is insane. (The Culture generally feels the same for the Counter-Culture.) The Indian feels the Cowboy is crude and materialistic, soulless. Donald Trump is a Cowboy, the conqueror of the world. Bill Gates is a Cowboy, a scientist conquering the world. Napoleon and Hitler were Cowboys. Bach, Rembrandt, Melville, and James Joyce were Indians. My thesis is that we need both. America, speaking generally, has given more credence to the Entrepreneur, the Cowboy, over the last thirty years. Sadly, I think most Americans would rather have their son grow up to be Donald Trump than Johannes Bach. I think this is explained by our overemphasis on the practical Daylight side of life – devotion to the so-called ‘real world’ -- and the religion of Materialism that has dominated the world since the Scientific world-view dethroned the Religious world-view in the West, especially over the last 200 years or so.

That is not to say that the Donald Trumps of the world have no value. Donald Trump plays his role, as do all of the builders of the physical world. It’s just that for every million Donald Trumps the world creates, the world creates only one Johannes Bach.

America, speaking generally, gave more credence to the Artist, the Musician, the Poet, from 1965-1982 however. At least the youth of America did, which is the machine that drives Western culture.

I believe America’s future will be great in terms of cultural developments. I will discuss, in a later chapter, the American civilization vis-à-vis the Roman civilization. Intellectuals, especially European intellectuals, enjoy despising American culture by equating it to ancient Rome. Ancient Romans were skilled as warriors and engineers, as city-builders, and empire-makers, as the ‘Policemen of the World’. The Day-Force, the Cowboys, in other words. In this view, Greece was the culture of the world and Rome was the body, the uncultured force of will. In the same way, today, Europe is the culture of the world, the Greece of today. Rome was a nation of materialistic bullies. Many, today, view America in this same way.

Hinduism speaks of a Father-Mother principle, the Unity split into two, before the duality splits into adversarial manifestation.

Rome was a Father-Mother principle, manifesting, first, as the Father, the militarist, the force of earthly order, business, pragmatism. Later, after corrupt ancient Rome was overrun by Germanic barbarians, Rome manifested as the Mother, giving birth -- after a long-period of dormancy (the Dark Ages) -- to Renaissance European city states, which later developed in to the independent countries, cultures and languages of Europe and England.

To judge Rome fairly, one must view Roman history in both parts: the Day world of the powerful Patriarch, with his powerful army, his business acumen, who dominated the physical universe – the civilization stage -- and the Night world of the powerful Matriarch who gave birth to Modern Europe – the culture stage. Julius Caesar transformed in to Jesus Christ, at Midnight; and, then, at Dawn, in to Michaelangelo, Leonardo, Dante, Shakespeare, Bach, Goethe…and all of the great artists and thinkers that grew up from Rome’s rich animated diffuse soil.

America will have a similar period of cultural greatness. But America will also need to go through a Dark Age to get to the stage of cultural rebirth. Economic depressions (Night-Cycles) are Dark Ages in miniature form (36-year cycles in toto). Historical Dark-Ages are Winter-Cycles, enduring for hundreds of years.

If the life on Earth does not end in 2012, then we can expect American history to mirror roughly Rome’s own history, with an eventual collapse of democratic government (the Republic Stage), an advent of government by an autocratic family or families (the Empire Stage, even more dramatically executed than today, with even greater failures), and a final collapse into corruption and fall to a barbarian invading culture (or, perhaps, a great civil war through which the powers of East-Coast American cities are overthrown.).

According to this scenario, current American regions (New England, Northeast Corridor, Atlantic Coast, Deep South, Midwest, Rocky Mountains, Southwest, Pacific Northwest, and California) will, over time, and through a Dark Age stage of isolation, germination, and spiritual regeneration, develop independent national cultures with languages and dialects rooted in English, much as Europe developed cultures and languages from the root of Rome’s Latin world-language.

If the lens I’m using is accurate, a messiah figure is also scheduled to appear in America during this next century. A messiah figure who is both lion and lamb, and may manifest the lion aspect of his character 2,000 years after having manifested the lamb side of his nature. We will look at this more closely later.

The ‘Culture’ comes from the inner world and creates the outer world, the Civilization; and the ‘Counter Culture’ destroys the civilization and re-creates the inner world, the Culture. The Counter-Culture flows in to the Culture (when there is Unity) and flows out of the Culture (when the Father-Aspect and the Son-Aspect begin to disagree).

The ‘Culture’ largely ignores the inner world, and, in so doing, allows the Dream-Body to wither. The ‘Counter-Culture’ largely ignores the outer world – hence, degeneration of the physical world occurs, economic depression being an aspect of this – and focuses on regeneration of the culture’s Dream-Body. Hence, the orthodox ‘Culture’ must focus on re-ordering the external world when it re-ascends to power, because the ‘Counter-Culture’ has allowed the Physical Body to become weak and disordered (the Night has abandoned the physical body).

‘Eternal life’ depends upon the vitalization of both bodies – the Physical Day Body and the Dream Night Body. When Day comes, we inhabit the Physical Form. When Night comes, we inhabit the Dream Body.

Building civilization is a Day activity. Building culture is a Night activity. The Sun is the great builder of Nature during the Day. The Sun, through the vehicle of the Moon, is the great builder (nurturer) of Nature during the Night. The Sun powers the Mind through the brain. The Moon powers the Soul through the heart. The Day is ruled by the Fire of the Sun. The Night is ruled by the Water of the Soul.

Generally speaking, the Republicans are Cowboys, and Democrats are Indians. The Republicans are the male-energy; Democrats are the female-energy. Generally speaking. The most recent manifestation in American politics of the Cowboy spirit began in 1982 with the advent of Ronald Reagan, the ultimate Cowboy Archetype, and ran through 2008. George Bush and John McCain were also manifestations of the Cowboy Nature. Reagan was the Cowboy Archetype re-born after a long retreat, disappearance and germination – the Cowboy again rising at the beginning of a Day Cycle. Bush and McCain were manifestations of the Cowboy Nature at the end of the Day cycle, worn out, defeated, declining.

Obama is a manifestation of the Indian Nature after a long period of Cowboy Rule. Obama is a symbol of the refreshed Indian, as Jimmy Carter was a symbol of the enervated, defeated Indian Nature.

Franklin Roosevelt as a manifestation of the re-born Indian Nature also after a long period of Cowboy Rule (1911-1929).

Abraham Lincoln was a manifestation of the re-born Indian Nature also after a long period of Cowboy Rule (1839-1857).

John Kennedy, very similar to Lincoln, was a manifestation of the re-born Indian Nature after a long period of Cowboy/Businessman Rule (1947-1965). Later we will discuss complications both Kennedy and Lincoln present when looking at our dual historical time-scale.

During the Day Cycles, the polarization tends to be external, the country is united; during the Night Cycles, the polarization tends to be internal, the country is divided.

Democrats nearly always preside over the Darkness in American history, the defeat of the material nature. I write this with some hesitation, understanding that there is some disagreement among historians as to the definition of an economic depression, about where the barrier between a recession and a depression can be drawn; there is also the problem with an historical definition of Democrat and Republican. A Democrat today is much different than a Democrat in Abraham Lincoln’s time (when the ‘Democratic Republicans’ were the ‘Democrats’ of today). I might attempt to illuminate this latter problem by defining ‘Democrat’ as the party that cares more for racial and economic equality and by defining ‘Republican’ as the party that uses Biblical references to justify racial and economic inequality through individual destiny and freedom. In one sense, the Republicans use Old Testament Biblical references to justify racial and economic inequality in the interests of national exceptionalism (a ‘chosen nation’ status as defined by the national monotheistic God); and the Democrats use New Testament references to justify policies of racial and economic equality as penance for sins (ego-inflation) committed during the Day Cycles through an excessive sense of exceptionalism.

In fact, Day-Cycles are manifestations of the Old Testament; and Night-Cycles are manifestations of the New Testament.

The ‘Republicans’ also focus their philosophy on the opportunities for and the freedom of the individual; ‘Democrats’ focus their attention on what is good for the nation as a whole. ‘Republicans’ defend the corporation, which is both an individual entity, and a symbol of ‘bodily’ existence, a noun, a manifestation of ‘I am’ -- the life as the Ego. ‘Democrats’ defend co-operation, a verb, an (moral) activity, a manifestation of the Self and the collective experience.

I am not making moral judgments in this description. The Cowboy responds to an external threat – and to the re-polarization of life that occurs as the Darkness is ending. The Cowboy defends the laws that define the life of the civilization. The Cowboy drives off the criminal darkness, the dangerous storm clouds, which have aggregated during the Night, with real intentions of suffocating the society through violence and revolution.

Reagan ‘saved’ America from the self-hatred of Jimmy Carter, as the Dawn returned and ‘re-incarnation’ was demanded. Re-incarnation, in this sense, happens every day when the human awakens from sleep, and resurrects the ‘personality’ of the Ego which has lost its structure during a night of sleep. (Reincarnation also works on larger scales of manifestation.)

Reagan re-introduced the structure of the American personality after that personality had been crucified during the Darkness of the 1960’s and especially 1970’s.

I believe Jimmy Carter saw himself as a messiah figure, a shadow of Christ (his initials J.C. perhaps helping to illuminate this destiny to him). Jimmy Carter put himself upon the cross in order to pay for American sins of the Indian Wars, slavery, racial discrimination and persecution, inequality in American society, immoral foreign intrusions in Latin America and Asia, most recently in Vietnam.

The Darkness is a time of self-judgment, self-condemnation, as the sins of the Day are visited upon the nation, illuminated in the Soul by the pure light of the Moon. Each incarnation brings more sins the society must face during the Night. That is why the Wheel of Incarnation (Re-Birth) is considered the vehicle of Karmic Debt.

Our Cowboy defends freedom in the world. That is the positive side. But there is a shadow side to this also. Our Cowboy defends freedom in the world so that American corporations can do business in foreign countries, enabling Americans can enjoy a higher standard of living – this often involves the suppression of legitimate political goals of foreign countries and foreign nationals, even to the point of the U.S. injecting marines in foreign countries to ensure the freedom of American corporations to profit from foreign enterprises.

The U.S. military is the ‘muscle’ of American business. Nations who follow the capitalist model – and which allow American business to operate and profit – become our allies. In this we are not so different than most nations of the world, during their expansionary, civilization, empire stage. But there is a moral cost to all this. Karmic debt accrues. Much of the social and moral chaos that occurs during the Dark Phase of the Winter months in a society is caused by the selfish, isolated Ego acting out its survival instincts during the Day. The Soul judges the Body, and condemns the Body as being immoral. Civil War often becomes the result of this Karmic self-judgment. Revolutions are the children of the Night. Religious re-births are also the product of the Night cycle.

The Soul is pure, perfect, because it is the principle of Life, taking the shape of the body that contains it. The Body is not pure or perfect. The Body despises the Soul during the Day for its weakness and ineffectuality. The Soul cannot get things done, and is literally helpless in the practical world. The Soul despises the Body during the Night for its immorality, and its aggressive selfishness, and lack of imagination and spiritual essence.

During the Day, white judges black. During the Night, black judges white.

During the Day, white becomes black with sin. During the Night, black becomes white through an alchemical purification process, by washing itself white in the light of the Moon and through the fire of its own empyrean suffering and ‘emptying’ condition. The soul returns to its source, to its original condition.

Day Energy is hierarchical since it is fighting a real or perceived war against the Darkness in an attempt to live, in an attempt to suppress the Darkness, and create a sanctuary that excludes the darkness. Michael the Archangel is a Christian form of Apollo when he drives the Darkness out of heaven and chains Satan in the underworld. As Spring winds drive away Winter storm clouds, so do the Cowboys drive away Night-world pessimists after re-birth.

Reagan drove away Carter pessimists (self-destructive passive moralists) through the sheer power of his positive energy, after the Democrats had ruled the Darkness in America from 1965 through 1982. The positive energy has to build, has to generate forms.

Of course, there are democratic presidents who rule during the Day phase (Bill Clinton was a recent example of this). And republican presidents also rule during the Night phase (Richard Nixon was an example of this).

I remember a few years ago when my elder brother scoffed -- when recalling Nike’s motto: “Just do it! -- ‘That’s right! Just do it! Don’t think about what you are doing!’ My brother was in the grip of Apollonian reflective, inactive energy. My response was: ‘Just do it! Don’t talk about it!’ I was in the grip of Dionysian energy of will and activity.

Dionysus must act. The external world is his playground. Apollo must think and talk. The world of ideas is his playground.

As I have written earlier, the illusion is that these are two separate entities. Apollo is Dionysus (anti-Apollo) at an earlier stage of his life. Dionysus is Apollo (anti-Dionysus) at both an earlier and a later stage in his life. Human life begins in Apollo, becomes Dionysian, and then re-becomes Apollonian once again. The child is Apollo; the adult is Dionysus; the defeated adult is Apollonian once again.

These three steps relate to the Christian Trinity, and also to the ‘three steps of Vishnu’ in Hindu mythology, and the three aspects of divinity: Brahma, who creates through the mind, Vishnu, who preserves through the body, and Siva, who destroys again through the mind (or Spirit).

So, we have concluded that, indeed, there are cycles in Human Manifestation. Can we measure these historical cycles accurately?

Can we even get historians to agree on when economic depressions occurred in America? I don’t think we can. Part of the problem is distinguishing a ‘recession’, matter approaching a small black hole, from a ‘depression’, matter approaching a large black hole.

I believe the astronomical metaphors are appropriate. Others may find this representation of a metaphorical truth as a physical reality to be troubling. The Day World is ruled by literalism, linear rationality, and causality. The Night World is ruled by metaphor, analogy, and symbolism. In the Day World: ‘This is caused by that’. This is a description of the straight line: Time running from Past through Present to Future, sequentially.

In the Night World: ‘This is related to that. (And everything, indeed, is related.)’ This is a description of the circle, with a network of connecting lines – more like a spider’s web: a matrix, with connections running from all directions. This is a view of simultaneity: all Times (past, present and future) existing in the same container, connected through the graces of…metaphor, analogy, through a kind of optical overlay, with patterns inside of patterns. We will look at this again later.

An economic depression is a large entity, state or systems of states, collapsing in on itself. A black hole is a large astral entity (a massive star) collapsing in on itself. The gravity is so strong in a black hole that no mass falling in to perimeter of its influence can escape the gravity of its downward pull. No amount of matter thrown at the black hole will escape the gravity, the downward pull of the black hole.

What is the white hole, then? A maddening kind of symmetry seems to exist in Nature. A black hole is a region of space from which nothing can escape. A white hole (a time-reversed version of a black hole) is a region of space into which nothing can fall. A black hole can only suck things in; a white hole can only spit things out. The Black Hole is the Force of Night; the White Hole is the Force of Day.

Is it possible, using Time’s symmetry as a model, that a black hole could evaporate into a white hole over time, recycling energy back in to the system through this inner transformation? This model of energy recycling seems to have been very ably anticipated by an age-old Asian glyph that also represents the relationship between Apollo and Dionysus, and between the Solar Day Force with its weakened Lunar Night Force and the Lunar Night Force with its weakened Solar Day Force.

How many depressions has America experienced in the Twentieth Century? We can all agree on one, although historians will argue when it began and when it ended. For argument’s sake, let’s say it started in 1929 and ended in 1947 – many economists, I trust, would accede to this. This may be right or wrong – but we can live with it at the moment.

Ok. We are now experiencing perhaps the second depression in the last 100 years. Did this begin in 2001, with the bursting of the dot com bubble? Or did it begin in 2007, with the breaking of the housing bubble?

For argument’s sake, let’s say 2001 (despite Alan Greenspan’s best intentions).

Recessions? Some historians also claim there was a recession in the U.S. from 1965 – 1983, during the long years of democratic rule, with unemployment rates as high as 9% nationally and an inflation rate of 13.5% in 1980. That sounds like a depression to me. There is no question that America was experiencing a spiritual depression in the 1970’s and early 80’s. America was undergoing an Ego-death Night experience then, with racial riots, unrest generated by an unpopular (many said racist-) war; this period was also distinguished by a huge growth in interest in Asian mysticism, a sign of Night-Cycle inundation.

In my mind, economic recession/depressions/stagflations are not measured by GDP growth and decline, but are ‘spiritual deaths’ in much the same way that economic expansions are national Ego inflations (symbolized by the erect male sexual organ)…the man taking ‘heaven by force’, expanding its influence, realm of law, business-interest imperative. ‘Spiritual deaths’ – using the same metaphor – represent the male imperative in its flaccid state, impotent in the world. It is interesting that the ‘viagra era’ has swept over the entire earth. This is, when seen in its unconscious meaning, an attempt by the masculine Ego-Force to short-circuit the approaching Night through the use of mind/technology and pharmaceutical magic. This won’t work, of course. Nature is very demanding; and Nature wins during the Night-Cycle. I would not be surprised to see use of Viagra be linked to some form of health plague eventually. Sixty-year-old men are not supposed to be sixteen. The fact that sixty-year-old men want to be sixteen says much about the spiritual vacuum in which we live today – the pleasures of life are linked to the sex organs and to the sex organs alone.

Interestingly, if we take the following years as starting points for American recessions/depressions since 1900:

1929

1965

2001

…we find that there are exactly 36 years between the start of each depression. Being an amateur mathematician, I assume that a full cycle (from recession to recession) of 36 years implies a Day cycle of 18 years and a Night cycle of 18 years. Is there that much symmetry in economic history?

Perhaps. (As I have written, reasonable historians can argue about the starting and the ending dates of something as nebulous as a depression, as they can also argue the characteristics and real nature of an economic depression. But, for the sake of argument, let’s proceed.)

1929 - 1947: 18 years

1965 – 1983: 18 years

2001 – 2019: 18 years

If there is truth in these numbers, and there is some kind of sacred discipline involved in historical manifestation, then the following years should have also displayed such peaks and valleys of American economic expansion and contraction.

1713 Night Cycle Ego Deflation begins – 1731 Day Cycle Ego Inflation begins

1749 Night Cycle Ego Deflation begins – 1767 Day Cycle Ego Inflation begins

1785 Night Cycle Ego Deflation begins – 1803 Day Cycle Ego Inflation begins

1821 Night Cycle Ego Deflation begins – 1839 Day Cycle Ego Inflation begins

1857 Night Cycle Ego Deflation begins – 1875 Day Cycle Ego Inflation begins

1893 Night Cycle Ego Deflation begins – 1911 Day Cycle Ego Inflation begins

1929 Night Cycle Ego Deflation begins – 1947 Day Cycle Ego Inflation begins

1965 Night Cycle Ego Deflation begins – 1983 Day Cycle Ego Inflation begins

2001 Night Cycle Ego Deflation begins – 2019 Day Cycle Ego Inflation begins

Since American history is relatively short, it is difficult to test this hypothesis. However, judging from the century of so existence of the American Stock Exchange (Dow Jones Industrial Average), and using this as a gauge of economic expansion and contraction, it is apparent the stock market did follow the inflation-deflation cycles almost perfectly.

By being in the Dow Jones Industrial Average only during the Ego-Inflation or Day Cycles, one would have amassed profits of more than 1700%, or 41% per year. By being out of the Dow Jones Industrial Average during Ego-Deflation or Night Cycles, one would have missed losses of 51%, or 1.15% per year.

STOCK MARKET RETURNS

1923* DJIA @ 75.23 - 1929 DJIA @ 331.65: EGO INFLATION CYCLE: Positive 400% - 67% per year.

1929 DJIA @ 331.65 - 1947 DJIA @ 175.66: EGO DEFLATION CYCLE: Negative 47% : -3% per year.

1947 DJIA @ 175.66 - 1965 DJIA @ 854.36: EGO INFLATON CYCLE: Positive 386% : +22% per year.

1965 DJIA @ 854.36 - 1983 DJIA @ 1045.07: EGO DEFLATION CYCLE: Positive 22%: +1% per year.

1985 DJIA @ 1045.07 - 2001 DJIA @ 10,604.59: EGO INFLATION CYCLE: Positive 915%: +51% per year

2001** DJIA @ 10,604.59 - 2019: EGO DEFLATION CYCLE (through 2/09 DJIA @ 7850.41): Negative 26%: -3% per year.

* Could not find DJIA prices back to 1911.

** Current deflation from 2001 to February 2009.

Many will argue that this kind of precision in Nature’s manifestations in the Human Kingdom is untrue and even ridiculous, an example of man seeking to impose order on Nature’s chaos. This may be true about everything humanity thinks. That is a separate issue.

Of course, scientists do not argue with the precision shown in Nature’s Time structures (Day, Month, Year, Sidereal Year, Cosmic Year). No one argues with the geometric precision of material structures: a common snowflake (a hexagonal crystal), a water molecule, an ice crystal, or methane. If Nature manifests geometrically, then why would Nature’s Time-Patterns not manifest with geometric precision?

Snowflake crystal Water molecule Ice crystal Methane

Sunspot cycles apparently happen each 11+ years. Each 28+ years Saturn returns to the same place in the heavens. Each 28+ days the Moon makes a complete cycle. Each 365+ days, the Sun makes a complete cycle. Jupiter returns to the same place in the heavens each 12+ years. Solar eclipses come in patterns that lay a lattice of light/shadow on the Earth running north to south or south to north every 18 years and 11 days, called the Saros Cycle. A catalog of Solar Eclipse Saros 127 shows a return of the eclipse in line with our Day-Expansion Night-Contraction cycles: (running from the future back in time, expected or documented) 2055, 2037, 2019, 2001, 1983, 1965, 1947, 1929, 1911, 1893, 1875, 1857, 1839, 1821, 1803, 1785, 1767, 1749, 1731, 1713…

In ancient myth, the wounding of killing of the Sun-Hero or Sun God signaled the decline of the Day and the manifestation of the Night-cycle – in effect, the power of the Sun was eclipsed.

There clearly seems to be order in Nature’s seemingly random manifestations.

The human calendar is a monument to the human understanding of Nature’s repeating patterns.

Ok, so Nature does work in repeating patterns. Even exacting patterns. Take the phenomena of Mautum (bamboo tree death) in Mizoram, a remote state in India. Every 48 years brown rats appear out of no where and destroy the rice fields in the area. This 48 year cycle stretches far back into history. What is the cause of this? The immediate cause is that for 47 years of the cycle there is not enough food in the forest to sustain the indigenous brown rat population. But every 48 years the bamboo forests in this region die; all the bamboo trees linked by an elaborate root structure die together. Each 50 years the bamboo trees flower; after the flowering, 2 years later the Melocanna bamboo drops a massive amount of bamboo fruit on the forest floor. Suddenly the forest has a huge amount of excess fodder. The rat population explodes, overruns the forest and the neighboring fields, destroying crops, leaving the inhabitants without subsistence rice for the year. Starvation ensues. Forty-eight years ago, this phenomenon led to an armed revolt against India, as the people of Mizoram felt their calls for help were ignored by Indian politicians.

So, the death and re-birth of the Melocanna bamboo forests cause the 48 year cycle of brown rat pests. But what causes the 50-year life-cycle of the Melocanna bamboo forests? Scientists have transplanted Melocanno bamboo trees from Southeast Asia half-way around the world, only to find that the South American transplants die at exactly the same moment that their siblings do in Mizoram or Thailand.

But what gives credence to the author’s 18-year cycles of American history? Do these cycles ‘work’? They seem to work with the stock market cycles, in a very imprecise sort of way.

I am no expert on American history. I wish I were. It would make this study much easier for me to complete.

My intent is to look at the perceived importance and stability of numbers (as emanations of God, or God’s thoughts) throughout history and then to attempt a deciphering of America’s very short history in light of these 18-year cycles.

I do remember from my Catholic education, that the history of Jesus Christ had a gap missing between his early education and his latter ministry of 18 years, during which time it is assumed he may have traveled to India to study mystical philosophy (and cycles) with the Hindus.

Constantly regard the universe as one living being, having one substance and one soul; and observe how all things have reference to one perception, the perception of this one living being; and how all things act with one movement; and how all things are the cooperating causes of all things which exist; observe too the continuous spinning of the thread and the contexture of the web."
- Marcus Aurelius

CHAPTER FIVE.

NUMBERS – AND THE NUMERICAL MANIFESTATION OF HISTORY

(Where Do Numbers Come From? What Do They Mean?)

‘You know, the difference between you and me is that I think

the world Is a circle, and you think the world is a straight line.’

Richard E. Nesbett, quoting a Chinese student: The Geography of

Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently, And Why

Many readers may find this clear, exact numerology embedded in history (indeed, is the law of historical manifestation) impossible to fathom or believe. If this precision were inherent in Nature, why didn’t everyone know about it? Why was it such a mystery?

Of course, scientists do know about the precision of numbers. That’s what allows them to project a rocket into space for thousands of miles and have the rocket land on a dime. We know there is a precision of numbers in the physical world. Why would there not be a similar precision of numbers in the metaphysical world.

Pythagoras, the first great philosopher in classical Western culture, believed in the sacredness of number. To Pythagoras, God was number. Pythagoras claimed: ‘Number is the ruler of forms and ideas, the most ancient and ruling Deity. Number is the canon, the reason, the intellect and the most undeviating balance of the composition and generation of all things.’ According to Pythagoras, Number was the first essence of Nature. Pythagoras claimed that between men and numbers there was a science of correspondence.

Plato later wrote that ‘God is ever geometrizing’. Deity is Number; Number is Deity. Plato taught his students that ‘the Soul is a Number’. He would also write: ‘Geometry is the knowledge of the eternally existent’ – reminding me of what I wrote earlier about symbolic, scriptural, poetic language.

According to Orpheus: ‘the eternal essence of number is the most providential principle in the universe; it is the root of the permanency of divine things, of Gods and daemons.’

Porphyry writes that numerals were ‘hieroglyphic[al] symbols by means of which he taught ideas concerning the nature of things’.

These ideas of Number did not start with the Greek philosophers. The Greeks learned much from the Hindus in India and from the Egyptians. The Hindus had a highly-developed system of numbers and geometric symbolisms. For the Hindus, the universe begins in Darkness, the Unmanifest Unknowable Deity, Unchanging, Primordial Chaos, Zero, the Circle. The Zero transforms itself into One when the universe manifests, when the Night phase transforms into the Day phase. At the basis of all existence lies the binary system of zero and 1.

As the alarm clock of Manvantara (Day-Phase Activity) sounds, Deity transforms itself into 1, the Unity, the contained Universe, the Circle with a central point. This Deity then divides itself into 2 parts, the Duality, Light and Darkness, Day and Night, Activity and Rest, a Circle with a central diameter. Deity then manifests as the 3, the Mediating Middle Principle, Life, the Synthesis mediating the opposites, the Thesis and the Antithesis. The 3 then reflects itself below, creating the 4, the Sacred Square – or the Cube when taking on dimensionality – upon which model the entire universe is created. This Builder’s Square, of course, is again composed of a duality: two triangles offset as reflections.

The Hindus built an elaborate chronological exegesis based on the first four numbers of their cosmology: 4320, which acted as a numerical foundation-stone in Indian philosophy. The Hindus divided the duration of their four seasons (or Yugas) of Spring (Golden Age) Krita Yuga, Summer (Silver Age) Treta Yuga, Autumn (Bronze Age) Dwapara Yuga, and Winter (Iron Age) Kali Yuga into different lengths, their sum being 4,320,000 moral years.

Mortal years.

360 days of mortals make a year 1

Krita Yuga contains 1,728,000

Treta Yuga contains 1,296,000

Dwapara Yuga contains 864,000

Kali Yuga contains 432,000

The total of the said four Yugas constitute a

Maha Yuga 4,320,000

432,000 x 2 = 864,000.

432,000 x 3 = 1,296,000

432,000 x 4 = 1,728,000

The 4320 is truly the (smallest) building block of these time phases (432,000), and also the sum of the whole (4,320,000), both microcosm and macrocosm.

Interestingly, if one adds these ‘building block’ digits together, one arrives at one of the primary ‘building block numbers’ of time. 4 + 3 + 2 + 0 = 9.

Our 18 and 36 year cycles of American economic inflations and deflations are numbers that are, of course, divisible by 9.

Many ‘rationalists’ will dismiss this type of analysis as mystical hocus-pocus. The mathematician, however, will recognize immediately that these ‘magic numbers’ (magic years) are all ‘elements’ of the circle with its 360°.

One will notice quite quickly that the above Yuga numbers break down into interesting component sums:

4 + 3 + 2 + 0 = 9

8 + 6 + 4 = 18

1 + 2 + 9 + 6 = 18

1 + 7 + 2 + 8 = 18

Christian mystics assigned the Number 7 to the Virgin Mary since its was the only number among the numbers of the sacred dekad that could not divide the 360° of the circle as a whole number. The number 7 was ‘not touched’ by the world.

1 360

2 180

3 120

4 90

5 72

6 60

7 51.4285

8 45

9 40

10 36

Deity, in every culture, has been represented by the circle, an emblem of unity and totality. Deity is the Being inside of which/whom we have our being. Deity is the bubble, the universe, inside of which we have our life. It is a leap, but not an unreasonable leap, to comprehend that each human soul or being is a cell in God’s Body – i.e., a circle inside a larger circle. Of course, we cannot know the being within whom we are living anymore than the cell in our own body can comprehend us, the totality, they help compose and animate.

This universe, of course, may be only a cell in a larger being. And this process may repeat for ever, smaller circles composing larger circles, and larger circles composing smaller circles, running for ever in both directions. Maybe for ever; maybe not forever.

Clearly, humanity can perceive larger circles than itself: the family is a larger circle, the town is a larger circle, the county is a larger circle, the state or district is a larger circle, the nation is a larger circle, the continent is a larger circle, the hemisphere is a larger circle, the planet is a larger circle, the solar system is a larger circle, the universe is a larger circle.

Humanity can also perceive smaller circles: the human organism is composed of cells, which is composed of molecules, which are composed of atoms, which are composed of a sub-atomic reality science does not fully understand at present.

Perhaps there are foundation stones on each end which cannot be split. This is possible. Poles which create a real boundary, inside of which lives or souls ascend and descend --Jacob’s Ladder seems to be the most common metaphor of this movement between poles. Jacob’s Ladder seems, in a metaphoric sense at least, very much like the chromosomal tree of life which informs all living matter.

Humanity can look through a telescope to see the larger circles of life; humanity can look through a microscope to see the smaller circles of life. This makes it appear that humanity is somehow in the middle between the two poles. This may or may not be true.

Jewish mythology represents Jehovah (Jod, the masculine, and Hovah, the feminine) – the duality instead of the unity – that is, the Creative God, the second manifestation of Deity, or Elohim -- as the ratio of the circumference of the circle to the diameter, or mathematically, Pi, 3.1415.

The circle is the bubble environment inside of which the Day-Phase activity takes place, the empty atom of Ego existence, which seems full, until the bubble breaks, and the Day-Phase inflation ends, and contraction or deflation begins.

ALHIM, Elohim, has the following symbolic numerical correspondence:

(A) = 1

(L) = 3

(H) = 5

(I) = 10 or 1

(M) = 40 or 4 =

13514, which, by transmutation, becomes 3.1415, or Pi. (In Jewish Gematria, or number symbolism, numerals and letters in a system can be re-ordered and read in different patterns as a way of metaphorically linking similar ideas or phenomena.)

Adding the numbers together (1 + 3 + 5 + 1 + 4) equals 14, which relates this to the Hebrew words for ‘gold’, ‘love’, ‘hand’, ‘garment’, ‘beginning’, ‘Beloved’, ‘David’, ‘valley’, ‘enough’, and ‘afraid’. (Interestingly, in the context of this book, the Hebrew word for ‘love’ is ‘ahab, which connects us back to our theme of megalomaniac light/darkness and Melville’s prophecy concerning the destiny of America.)

Reading the above number (13514) geometrically, we have a point, a triangle, a pentagram, a point, and a square. The 354 of this number-glyph describes the number of days there are in a lunar year, connecting Jehovah as Elohim to the Lunar or Night-Phase of the cycle.

It is during the Night, after the deflation, that God visits the Soul and offers the covenant of Life, the contract of physical re-birth.

Jehovah (Yah – Father, He – Mother, Vau – Son, He – Daughter) also corresponds to Saturn. Hence, the Jewish Sabbath is Saturday, Saturn’s Day. And the Sabbath is the 7^th and last Day of Creation, at which time all activity ceases…the perfection of creation is reached…and the bubble of Day-Activity is popped. This is the point at which Humanity must once again face its creator and be judged.

Saturn is known as Father Time, the Great Harvester, the Father Who Eats His Own Children. Saturn presides over the end of the world, the deflation of the Day-world back to the Nothingness of Night, back to God, or to Zero, formlessness (pre-atomic bodilessness).

Jehovah-Saturn is the God who both gives and takes away – that is, gives when He blows the bubble and creates Time-Space as we know it – the Day Cycle -- and takes away when He pops the bubble and brings about the Darkness of the naked soul standing before Eternity without a shell or a body and with no where to hide.

Saturn, the planet, returns to the same position relative to the Earth (approximately) every 28 years. Because the Moon’s cycle is (approximately) 28 days, Saturn is considered intimately connected to the Lunar Cycle; Saturn was always considered a Lunar God, governing the advent of both the Day and Night Cycles.

Significantly, Tetragrammaton, IHVH, the symbolic glyph for Jehovah-Saturn, has the corresponding numerical values:

I: 10

H: 5

V: 6

H: 5

= 26

I: 10

I + H: 15

I + H + V: 21

I+ H + V + H: 26

= 72

4-fold components of 72:

72

54

36

18

As should be readily apparent, ancient religious thought and numbers have always had an intimate connection.

The great Chinese philosophical system, The Book of Changes – I Ching – also indicates the importance of the number 9 and its building-block qualities (especially in its form of 9 x 4 = 72). W, K. Chu and W.A. Sherrill translate and comment upon the ‘Ho Map Lo Map Rational Number Manuscript’ in their books The Astrology of the I Ching:

Daily Calculation Cycles

The several aspects of the yearly hexagram control the daily cycles for the entire year. These are closely associated with the five elements: water, wood, fire, metal and earth. Each of these five elements is considered dominant for about 72 days each year, with the exception of the earth, which is given as the principal influence for 77 days a year…

Earth is believed to interact with the other elements at all times, and to come into dominance over its associated element during the last stages before each of the solstices and equinoxes. In calculating the length of time between seasons, it is found that, between the autumnal and the vernal equinox, the number of days is more or less exactly 180 days, whereas between the vernal and the autumnal equinox are 185 days plus. With this astrology being largely based on the influences of the sun and the earth, the extra days beyond 360 (5 elements multiplied by 72 day) are considered to be under the dominance fo the element earth. Hence, as will be seen subsequently, the hexagrams representing the element earth will influence these extra days. Compensation is thereby made for the fact that the winter solstice varies in its time of commencement during the appropriate days.

In connection with the foregoing, when one is analyzing any particular day one should also examine the preceding and succeeding days, as the cycles are not precisely defined as to where one begins and another ends, but, rather, represent a continuum of change.

An astrological year (beginning with the winter solstice) is cominated by the five elements approximately as follows:

(a) Water 72 days

(b) Earth 18 days

(c) Wood 72 days

(d) Earth 20 days

(e) Fire 72 days

(f) Earth 21 days

(g) Metal 72 days

(h) Earth 18 days

Seventy-two days (72) is the length of time it takes for a hexagram to change to its opposite and then return to its original state, allowing each line to be the controlling line for a day. The days start at the bottom line and move upwards. Thus each hexagram controls a six-day period, before changing into the next hexagram (the changes entering at the bottom and continuing to the top) when another six-day cycle takes place. A hexagram goes through its complete cycle of evolution in seventy-two stages, during which the controlling element (water, wood, fire or metal) goes through its seventy-two day cycle and exerts its controlling influence for that period of time, according to its stage of evolution on any given day.

The Heavenly Ideal of the Circle apparently translates to the moving earth as a 365-day orbit, not the 360 day orbit an Ideal Geometer might expect. Apparently the Earth is not traveling fast enough. If it were traveling at 30.23379 kilometers per second, then there would be 360 days in the year; instead it is traveling 29.79 kilometers per second. This difference is about 20 minutes per day. It seems that the Earth is a bit overweight.

I guess this is just one of the many imperfections on Earth. (Afterall, Heaven is the plane of perfection and perfect archetypes; Earth the plane of imperfect approximations of the archetypes. An architect’s blueprints may be perfect but this apparently does not mean that the building will be perfect.)

Joseph E. Mason, in his article ‘The Cycle of Time Number 432’ quotes mythologist Joseph Campbell’s ‘The Inner Reaches of Outer Space’ in which Campbell draws a comparison between the Babylonian and the Jewish Flood Myths (Genesis). Campbell shows that the ten kings living in Babylon from creation to the time of the flood lived a total of 432,000 years.

Sumerian King List

King City Year

Aloros Babylon 36,000 (3 + 6 = 9)

Alaparos Unknown 10,800 (1 + 8 = 9; 10 + 8 = 18)